Thoughts on Empowerment

People are empowered when they are given the authority and responsibility to make decisions affecting their work with a minimum of interference and second guessing by others.

Empowerment is an overused and under?practiced term. When people are empowered they bring their minds to work. They are engaged in making decisions that affect their part of the business. They take responsibility for their actions. They work free from the petty bureaucratic hassles that diminish value and waste time. They add value to the organization by embracing the principles of quality and service. They search for ways to make a difference.

Why Empowerment is Critical

Most organizations need knowledge workers -- men and women whose chief resource is their ability to think and act on what they know. Computer programmers, systems analysts, accountants, lawyers, managers, sales teams, and even factory workers must use their best judgment to solve problems and respond to opportunities.

Nordstrom is legendary in its customer service because it encourages and expects staff to make decisions that will make customers happy. A local Nordstrom store gives new staff a one-page employee handbook to illustrate this point. It reads: Use your best judgment at all times.

Why Empowerment Works

In Caught in the Middle (Productivity, 1992), I suggest that most people want a few basic things from work: meaning, results, challenge and an opportunity to learn, respect and recognition, control over their own part of the work, affiliation or knowing they are part of a bigger team.

These six items form the foundation of all good empowerment efforts. Remove any of them and you weaken the individual's commitment to his or her work. Fortunately, with regard to motivation, what's good for the individual is also good for the company.

Making Empowerment Work

Build on the six basic things people want (these are listed above.) Consider these items as a bedrock for all initiatives to increase empowerment. In addition, consider the following:

Clear Vision and Direction. Corporate leadership must know why it wants empowerment.

• What do you want to achieve from it?
• What would empowerment look like here?
• How committed are you to making empowerment a reality?
• Is empowerment essential or simply something that would be nice to have?

Examine Corporate Actions.

Policies. What gets rewarded gets done. What gets punished gets avoided. Corporate policies and procedures such as performance review and merit increases show people what is really important to senior management. For example, if people are told to work collaboratively but their performance reviews pit them against each other in forced appraisal ranking, people will protect their own self?interests. If you encourage cross?functional teamwork, but performance reviews only acknowledge work accomplished within a department, interdepartmental cooperation will suffer.

Unwritten Rules. These norms tell people how the game is played. People learn that these unwritten rules are as important as any written policy. For example, a manager may tell staff to always tell him or her the truth, but proceed to punish the messenger who brings the bad news.

Structure. To borrow a phrase from David Hanna's book, "Organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get." NUMMI is a highly successful auto manufacturing plant that relies on high worker commitment and skill. It replaced a terrible GM plant in which absenteeism was running at 25% the year it closed and where quality was a joke. Ironically, when NUMMI opened, it hired back many of the same seemingly unmotivated workers from the old plant. The only major difference between NUMMI and its predecessor was how it was managed. People were free to stop the assembly line to solve quality problems. They were encouraged to learn many different tasks so they could add greater value to the assembly process. In short, they were empowered.

Why Is It So Difficult To Achieve?

Tom Peters once said, "we are only at the advanced lip service stage." I agree. We often are afraid to trust that others will actually do the work without close scrutiny. I never met anyone who said that a rigorous performance appraisal system helped him or her do better work. Yet most managers believe that it is an essential tool to use to motivate others. (If only those other people were as trustworthy as we.)

Watchful eyes breed dependency. When people try to please mom and dad they fail to take the risks and initiative needed to help a dynamic organization thrive. People wait to be told what to do. As the sign in a French civil servant's office read, "Never do anything for the first time."

If your work is going to be reviewed, folded, spindled, and mutilated by five others up the line before it is approved, why bother giving your best effort?

Our view of organizations is based on hierarchy and chain of command. People above you make the decisions, people below carry them out. This model is firmly entrenched. Sometimes I think it is encoded in our DNA. It can only change when we see that it works against initiative and empowerment, and when we are willing to step back and take a cold sober look at they ways in which our own actions may be creating the dependency and lackluster performance we abhor.

There Is Hope

There is a revolution going on in corporations. Since Peters and Waterman's watershed book, In Search of Excellence and our discovery of W. Edwards Deming in the early 1980's, organizations have been experimenting with ways to increase employee involvement. Even the federal government is trying to reinvent itself using principles of empowerment. Some organizations succeed, others fail-- but we can learn from them all. These brave companies and agencies are providing the living textbooks that can point the way to new models of organization that treat people with dignity and respect -- and serve the interests of the business.

Here are some examples of how others are using the principles of empowerment.

Large System Change. Organizations such as Corning get everyone (or at least a representative sample of all levels of the organization) in a room to reengineer their portion of company. Since this planning process involves those who must implement the changes, resistance decreases and commitment increases, planning and implementation time are compressed, and the quality of the plan often far exceeds what outside consultants or a small team could have created.

Cross-functional Teams. Companies such as Conrail pull together talented people from the middle of the organization and empower them to tackle pressing business challenges. These teams are more than task forces -- they have the power to recommend and implement change.

Access to Information. Many organizations are examining how work is done in an effort to streamline service to customers. They develop new procedures that ensure the people closest to the work have immediate access to the tools and information they need. (In traditional organizations information is power and often kept away from those who need it most.)

Promote the Best. Back in 1991, Jack Welch introduced his theory of leadership in General Electric's Annual Report. (At the time, I called these few pages the best leadership book of the year.) In it, he said that GE needs people who keep commitments (meet deadlines and financial targets) as well as people who promote the values of the company (empowerment, etc.). In the past, they only gave lip service to the values goal. It was nice, but it didn't drive promotions. To get ahead you had to meet the numbers. Welch went on record as saying those days were over. He wanted men and women who could accomplish both goals. To prove his resolve, he timed the firing of some visible old-line managers with the publication of the report.

To Begin Conversation

Here are a few random questions to begin a conversation on empowerment.

Of course the list could go on, but these should be sufficient to begin a provocative dialogue on the subject.

Rick is an advisor to organizations on ways to lead Change without Migraines?. He is author of many books on change including Why Don't You Want What I Want? and Beyond the Wall of Resistance. You can access free articles and tools at http://www.beyondresistance.com.

In The News:

---

Google News Updated : Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:13:38 GMT Hillary Clinton's Staff Looking to Avoid Embarrassing Anti-Obama ... - FOXNews Times Online Hillary Clinton's Staff Looking to Avoid Embarrassing Anti-Obama ... FOXNews - 58 minutes ago Hillary Clinton's staff is trying to avoid an embarrassing anti-Obama demonstration by her supporters during the floor vote at next week's Democratic convention in Denver. Clinton Will Attend Fund-Raiser for Towns New York Times Clinton for VP? She Says Ask the Obama Campaign ABC News CNN Political Ticker - New York Times Blogs - Newsweek - U.S. News & World Report all 546 news articles Publ.Date : Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:15:16 GMT IAC Officially Breaks Up - Wall Street Journal Los Angeles Times IAC Officially Breaks Up Wall Street Journal - 55 minutes ago By DAVID BENOIT and KATHY SHWIFF IAC is left as a collection of more than 35 Internet companies -- including search engine Ask.com, dating site Match. IAC: And Then There Were Five Forbes Diller's IAC Split May Fail to Boost Investor Returns (Update2) Bloomberg The Associated Press - MarketWatch - FOXBusiness - CNNMoney.com all 280 news articles Publ.Date : Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:17:40 GMT My Super Sweet 16: The Miley Cyrus Edition - E! Online E! Online My Super Sweet 16: The Miley Cyrus Edition E! Online - 3 hours ago Miley Cyrus is about to show up all those spoiled brats on My Super Sweet 16 who think they're cool being flown to their party by helicopter or when they're carried in like a princess by a group of hot dudes. Miley Cyrus to Celebrate Turning 16 at Disneyland People Magazine Miley Cyrus Sweet 16 KFSN Press-Enterprise - The Gossip Girls - United Press International - Best Syndication all 87 news articles Publ.Date : Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:21:48 GMT GM to Invest $500 Million To Build Chevy Cruze - Wall Street Journal Turkish Press GM to Invest $500 Million To Build Chevy Cruze Wall Street Journal - 3 hours ago By KATHY SHWIFF General Motors Corp. will spend more than $500 million in the US to build the Chevrolet Cruze, a next-generation compact car. GM announces $500M investment for small car The Associated Press GM to invest $500 million in small car plant MarketWatch Reuters - CNNMoney.com - CNET News - BloggingStocks all 266 news articles Publ.Date : Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:10:12 GMT Marlins let one slip away in San Francisco - Sports Network The Associated Press Marlins let one slip away in San Francisco Sports Network - 39 minutes ago San Francisco, CA (Sports Network) - Marlins reliever Kevin Gregg's wild pitch in bottom of the ninth inning scored Emmanuel Burriss to send San Francisco past Florida, 4-3, in the finale of a three-game series. Giants walk off on Gregg's wild pitch MLB.com Giants beat Marlins on wild pitch in 9th inning The Associated Press San Jose Mercury News - Rotoworld.com - Akron Farm Report - Flamarlins.com all 81 news articles Publ.Date : Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:33:45 GMT Microsoft's Photosynth wilts under pressure - Computerworld Washington Post Microsoft's Photosynth wilts under pressure Computerworld - 44 minutes ago By Gregg Keizer August 21, 2008 (Computerworld) Within hours of its launch, Microsoft Corp.'s new photo-stitching service went dark, overwhelmed by demand, the company said Thursday afternoon. New Microsoft photo site spends first day offline The Associated Press New Microsoft Tech Converts Photo Soup Into 3-D Image TechNewsWorld InformationWeek - PC Magazine - TG Daily - Christian Science Monitor all 323 news articles Publ.Date : Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:28:59 GMT UPDATE 1-Microsoft enlists Seinfeld for ad campaign--source - Reuters UPDATE 1-Microsoft enlists Seinfeld for ad campaign--source Reuters - 2 hours ago By Steve Gorman LOS ANGELES, Aug 21 (Reuters) - Comedian Jerry Seinfeld will star in a $300 million marketing campaign for Microsoft Corp aimed at burnishing the image of its computer operating system, a person familiar with the effort said on Thursday ... Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates to star in anti-Apple ads TG Daily Seinfeld to be pitchman for Microsoft The Associated Press Slashdot - Bizjournals.com - GameSHOUT - Ars Technica all 474 news articles Publ.Date : Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:27:28 GMT Clickbank Affiliate How to Earn Money At Home

PARLOT::Ebooks, Scripts, Websites, and more...

Adsense websites

Is Your Brain Getting the Memory Full Message? 5 Ways to Free Up Room on Your Brains Hard Drive