| The Truth About Empowerment. |
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By Alan Parisse, MBA, CSP, CPAE
October, 2005
To deal effectively with today’s turbulent and fast changing world, organizations and their leaders must be willing to continuously examine old solutions, assumptions, and beliefs and create new solutions.
Such creativity, takes imagination, courage and commitment. It also takes information and feedback from all levels of an organization. Ideas and actions must be able to start at any level and flow in any direction. Truth cannot be a “controlled substance.”
The problem is that executives, who were trained and rewarded for being clever, often refuse to empower their people to communicate their concerns, let alone to take action on their own. To make matters worse, most managers and workers have been educated, selected, trained and rewarded for following orders, not for asking questions, thinking or venturing out.
Nowhere is the reluctance to “tell it like it is” more prevalent than in the area of empowerment. While many executives realize that empowerment is not a passing fad, few understand how fundamental it is to their efforts to create the responsiveness and quality needed to compete in global markets. Effective executives replace myths with truths.
Dispelling Three Myths
Myth #1 – Empowerment is nice and it is easy.
Many executives convey the attitude that empowerment is being done for the benefit of employees. It is presented as some sort of benefit, one that will bestow a more satisfying work experience and dignity and growth opportunities to the “little people.” The “little people” know better.
The first truth: Empowerment is not nice. In a fast changing world it is necessary. Hierarchical bureaucracies simply cannot deliver the responsiveness, quality and price needed to meet today’s competitive challenges without it. While in the long run, empowerment may be a great benefit to all employees, initially, the recasting of organizational values is difficult at all levels.
Often, top management will be quick to endorse radical changes, but will tend to exempt themselves. It is understandable. Senior executives have been successful and many are reluctant to change. Their “box of success” runs something like this: “If what I have been doing worked well enough to get me to the top, it must be right. Why mess with it?” Actions such as sharing power and giving credit away cut a lot closer to the executive’s bone than acquiring another company, instituting a quality program or stressing customer service.
Many middle managers have a hard time accepting empowerment. After all, they came up through the ranks, taking orders, keeping their noses clean, and waiting for the day they could be boss. Now they are told to give their power away. That’s not easy to do.
Front-line employees also have problems with empowerment. Many are understandably reluctant to step outside their traditional roles. If they accept wider responsibility, they stand to greatly diminish the peace of mind and the satisfaction that comes with going home at night knowing they met the requirements of a finite job description.
More importantly, over the years, they have learned that many executives only give lip service to empowerment. Known for his slips of the tongue, movie mogul Samuel Goldwin may have revealed what for too many executives is the subtext of their messages on empowerment. Goldwin told his staff, “I want everyone to tell me the truth, even if it costs them their jobs.”
Front-line employees have learned to follow the Zeke Bunara Rule of Organizational Behavior. No bureaucrat, Mr. Bunara was a 1930’s baseball player, a very good hitter but an inept first baseman. Yet, his fielding average didn’t reveal his immobility. His motto: “If you don’t touch the ball, they can’t charge you with an error.” All too many front-line employees have learned to follow that rule.
MYTH #2—Empowerment is management driven.
Empowerment is not something management does to employees.
The second truth is that empowerment must be seized. The success of any empowerment program ultimately rests with the people to be empowered. While empowerment clearly requires management’s full and active support and participation, it is the middle managers and especially the front-line employees who must make it work. They are the ones who must grasp the responsibility they are offered, have the courage to constantly test and expand the edges of their authority, and have the common sense and loyalty to use their new-found power to serve the company and its customers, not just advance their own self-interests.
MYTH #3—Empowerment is a skill to be taught.
Many executives seem to think that reading a book, listening to a speech and taking a training program will empower people. They think empowerment is analogous to ballroom dancing, and all they need to do is teach their people the steps.
The third truth is that empowerment is not so much taught as it is uncovered. While certain skills training is necessary to assure that the people to be empowered understand the issues and situations they will be facing, management’s challenge is not to create empowered individuals. The challenge is to uncover existing abilities and nurture them.
By definition, empowerment is about people being more of themselves, not their fitting into some preconceived notion of an empowered employee. Programs must focus on identifying and removing both the organizationally dictated and the individually self-imposed barriers to employees being and expressing more of themselves.
The context of the program must be that these are powerful people, who after generations of hierarchical management fell out of the habit of displaying or experiencing their full ability and potential. Programs will not be effective if they are ordered from above and enforced by a fear-based system. Instead they must be emboldened by the truth and based on the assumption that people care about the organization and its customers, are intelligent, rational and want to do a good job.
Truthfully presented with challenge, people will empower themselves and get the job done.
© Copyright 2005. The Parisse Group, Inc.
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