In fact, here are 5 reasons empowerment is failing and how to make it better :. Everyone reading this blog needs information to make good decisions. As you move toward an empowered environment where employees make their own decisions, you must give them the same information you require to make sound decisions. As leaders, we have both authority and responsibility or at least we should have both. For most managers, when they give responsibility, they assume the authority goes along with it.
If you truly want employees around you to succeed in an empowered environment, then you must share your power. Most employees bring problems to their bosses to find someone else to make the decision. To move toward empowerment, require employees to bring you three possible solutions to any challenge they may have. Creating and leading an empowered team requires a very different set of skills to those needed by managers in the past.
They like the power and status that comes with their position and are worried that this will be diminished in an empowered culture. They will pay lip service to empowerment, but will not change their overall behaviour and will undermine any attempts to implement empowerment.
They may confuse empowerment with delegation, or have a vague idea that starting a suggestion scheme or creating working groups to address morale will bring about empowerment.
Others may simply believe that telling their staff that they are now empowered will do the trick. Building an empowerment culture, even among a small number of people, is not a simple activity, especially if previous managers have been particularly autocratic.
It requires time, effort and a coordinated approach. In other words, it needs to be treated as a project, covering beliefs, values, behaviours, systems, procedures and the environment. Clarifying the type of decision provides detail on the level of involvement of each person. Determining what type of decision one is facing also begins to surface issues around a second aspect of the decision-making model: who should be making the decision.
In effect, by clarifying the decision type, you are also identifying one of the critical decision roles—namely, that of the decision manager. But identifying the decision manager still leaves room for ambiguity about what type of participation others will have in the decision. Konnersman therefore defines two other roles: the consulted participant and the informed participant. A consulted participant, according to Konnersman, is contacted during the deliberating stage for the purpose of data-gathering, whereas the informed participant is brought in primarily to help with the implementation of a decision that has already been made.
Although this role is intended to help prevent the organization from making intolerable mistakes, if it is not used properly it can create a feeling of powerlessness and cynicism about empowerment. Although the goal of an empowered organization is to make all decisions as locally as possible, that desire needs to be balanced with the reality of the actual ability to make those decisions.
If viewed from this perspective, the approver role can be the means to judiciously manage the transition into empowered decision-making by acting as a safety net for the decision manager as well as for the organization.
In some situations, an approver needs to intervene in order to improve the quality of a decision B3. If it matched, he or she can then point out how the group had been empowered to make the decision. As a result, the group feels that they were not truly empowered to make the decision. In the future, they will be less likely to put the same level of enthusiasm or trust into the decision process — potentially leading to lower quality thinking and lower quality decisions, which may require further intervention from the approver R4.
In such situations, it is not the approver role itself that is the problem — it is the seemingly arbitrary use of the role that leads to a sense of powerlessness. Therefore, the leverage in this system is to identify the approver role in advance, and clearly establish the criteria under which a decision is subject to approval.
It is particularly important to identify the specific parameters — the time frame, organizational risk, dollar amount, scope of impact, and other criteria — that will determine when an approver must be involved. Such boundaries provide a pre-negotiated context in which the role can be used most effectively. Sometimes an approver must intervene to improve the quality of a decision B3. But if the approver role is not clarified at the outset, the intervention may breed resentment and lack of ownership over future decisions — potentially leading to lower quality decisions and further need for intervention R4.
In some cases, leadership would stand up small working groups to drive faster resolution of complex organizational issues, but no decisions or steps forward could ever be made without involving all the leaders to whom the working group participants reported.
Other times an experienced investment staff member would be working on a deal, assuming that he or she owned the right to lead and close the process, only to be stopped weeks down the road because the deal was deemed too risky or not appropriate higher up in the hierarchy.
Sometimes it would take two months to convince senior executives to close a deal, while competitors might take two weeks. The lack of agility had led many of the team members to become hesitant about their ability to assure investment partners that they could take the deal over the finish line, leading them to miss out on opportunities to bring in new business.
The disconnect between leaders and their employees is more common than we tend to think. While it is a step in the right direction that leaders understand the importance of empowerment as an enabler to a high-performing workplace and may pay it lip service, they sometimes struggle to put those words into actions and to fully understand the importance of a dialogue that includes listening, understanding, and coaching.
It is therefore critical for leaders to create space for regular and consistent trust-building conversations through which employees can be heard by their leaders.
These discussions will result in mutually beneficial relationships in which leaders can begin to get comfortable delegating responsibilities and employees can ask for appropriate help and advice and share their resulting success stories.
As a starting point, leaders need to understand how employees feel about their current scope of responsibilities and performance and what their aspirations are. It seems simple, but leaders often take this for granted, either assuming that all employees aspire to more when, in fact, some want nothing changed, or failing to realize when a highly capable worker is ready to take on new opportunities.
During a recent conversation with a senior executive at a leading insurance company, I learned that she had been struggling with one of her associates. She saw in her delegation efforts the opportunity to address the evolving needs of the team, but most importantly to help one of her people develop new skills. However, the associate would continuously fail to turn in error-free analyses. Not seeing much growth, she shared her frustration with me and I suggested that she ask the associate how she felt about the workload and new responsibilities.
The associate confessed that his initial scope of work better suited his personal constraints; while the employee appreciated that the new responsibilities reflected leadership commitment to development, they required adjustments to personal commitments and values; adjustments that the employee was not willing or able to make at that time.
Later, when the senior executive briefed me on the conversation, she had had to pick up the activities the associate never handled well and was in the process of bringing someone new to the team. On the other hand, employees should be able to express thoughts about their individual work and the role they see themselves playing in driving success.
It is important to note that the more employees are given room to lead this part of the exercise, sharing not only ideas but also execution strategies, the more engaged and transparent they are likely to be. Conducting a culture diagnostic at a leading agricultural biotech company, technicians reported that their leadership was not effective at resolving conflicts between employees.
As an example, one technician, also a team lead, mentioned that some team members failed to do their job properly, repeatedly failing to follow instructions posted on equipment. She brought up the problem with her manager, who suggested she hold one-on-one sessions with her workers to discuss the situation and find solutions. The team lead had expected that the manager would take the steps to engage with all parties to get to the root of the issue and solve it, ended up feeling criticized and let down by the directive.
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