Some Perspectives About Empowerment

Any conversation about empowerment in an organization that is not yet operating inside a stand, a committed future,  a mission, or a strategic intent, is a conversation that can only produce mischief:

1. To empower people when there is no clear and aligned on mission and strategic intent is to give people freedom to do stupid things faster, and with more freedom and permission
2. Or, it is to give people permission to advance their own agendas, recruit followers, resist opposing points of view, create factions, create winners and losers, and to dominate others and use whatever force they can get away with, to avoid the domination of others ideas and ways of doing things
3. It is also the quickest route to breakdowns, upsets, frictions, sub-optimization of the resources and possibilities of the organization - and in its worst case, it is a recipe for chaos and the eventual collapse of the organization.

Leaders and managers, by attempting to empower people before there is a context, a shared mission and strategic intent, have in effect, unintentionally created a condition in which they have little or no room to intervene when things happen they don't want, or when things are not happening that they do want, without being accused of not trusting people and of being disempowering.

So, most often, to avoid accusations of being disempowering leaders and managers most often abdicate. They don't intervene. Which implicitly means they choose to vacillate between complaining about no or insufficient results, at the same time they provide little to no leadership or direction. Worse, out of frustration with the way things are going, they intervene with their solutions which people have to accept - a reversion to what most leaders know best – command and control – or as I prefer to call it, organizational bullying.

Because these imposed solutions most often do not include the input or engagement of the people who have to implement them, leaders end up creating the opposite of what they want – a low morale,  disengaged, disempowered, high turnover and underproducing workforce.

Paradoxically, the very best way to unleash the genius, creativity and passion of people at work is to let them into the process of articulating the organization's mission. If the mission is long standing and well established – then give them the opportunity to understand it, digest it, assimilate it and make it their own.

Then let people in on the process of creating the strategic intent, and their own function or team's strategy. And when that is done, then, and only them, empower them to use their best intelligence to make the strategies work and to move the organization closer to realizing its mission.

The bottom line a very tight control of the mission and values of the organization and a loose control over the strategy, practices and behaviors to realize the organization's mission and live the values.

If we have the view that an organization is a complex, adaptive, intelligent, human social system then all we need to unleash its full potential is a compelling mission and freedom of self expression – and a few simple rules and tools.