Empowerment and Control

One of the most common complaints I hear when speaking to senior leaders is around a lack of empowerment in their teams. More specifically, the leader is trying to empower their people but the people are not responding - "I have told them they are empowered, but they still come to me for every little decision". Empowerment is a tricky thing. Telling people that they are empowered is easy, getting them to behave in an empowered way is a very different matter. The problem here is that we are looking at empowerment the wrong way round. Empowerment is not something you can just give to someone. While the giving of empowerment is important, it's not the only step. Empowerment only works when the receiver accepts it. You can give empowerment all you like, but if the intended recipient doesn't accept that empowerment, nothing will happen.

But why wouldn't someone accept empowerment? Everyone wants to be empowered don't they? Why don't they jump at the chance? Many years ago I worked for a very large engineering company and the management wanted to try out this brand new (It was a long time ago) empowerment thing. So they gave every employee an "empowerment card" with a statement from the CEO on it that said that anyone in the organisation was empowered to make any decision required. The idea was that if you wanted to seize empowerment by the horns and make a decision that was out of your normal role, you could whip out your card, toss it on the table and say "The CEO has empowered me to make this decision", and away you go. Sounds great doesn't it? Trouble is, not one person used it. Out of the 150,000 people in the company, not one person used one. Zero. Why?

When you learn that decisions made using the empowerment card would get reviewed through the usual approval channels with the strong implication that the regular approvers would come down on you like a ton of bricks if you made the "wrong" decision (ie: not the one they would have made) then the reluctance to use the empowerment card is obvious. Doing so was a career limiting move. If all went well you would be a hero, if something went wrong though, career over. There would be repercussions for "wrong decisions. And ''wrong" was very much in the hands of the regular decision makers. Any decisions that weren't exactly what they would have done were obviously "wrong".

This highlights the main problem with most efforts to empower people - lack of safety. You can't expect people to accept empowerment if it isn't safe. There are many reasons why it may not be safe. Existing power structures is one. Another is people's own confidence in their ability to make the decision. If they don't feel confident, they won't make the decision. Lack of confidence could be fear of reprisals, it could also be because they just don't think they have the right skills or knowledge. People need to feel competent before they will step up.

So empowerment needs to come with two things - safety and competence. People need to know that they are safe, particularly that if a wrong decision is made, the result will be training and support, not career-ending repercussions. People also need to feel that they have the right skills and information to make the decision correctly. So if existing structures in the organisation are holding onto information, or if people need special training, then they will not accept empowerment until those things are solved.

Probably the best way to look at empowering people is not to think about how to empower them, but instead at how the organisation can give up control. Over time, organisations have dis-empowered people by removing their decision rights and putting in multiple levels of review and approvals. These levels of review tend to accumulate specialist knowledge and to hide information from the rest of the organisation. As an example, one organisation I worked with had an approvals process for project spend - any spend that wasn't in the original plan, no matter how small, had to go to the review committee. The review committee had the regional managers, state managers and national manager. It met once a month and reviewed all project expenditure. So a $5M job that required two additional fibre patch cables that got missed from the original quote (total cost $50) go held up for a month waiting for approval.

Why was the approval there? Because project managers were approving additional spend that was eroding the margins of their projects to below the threshold where the organisation considered them profitable. The approval was there to stop the organisation losing money. Fair enough, you might think, but the project managers weren't told the margin of their projects. All they were given was a budget, not the original sell price, so they had no way of knowing what the margin was. Nor did they get told their threshold. No wonder then that they would, when trying to please a client, authorise additional spend. Where did that special knowledge live? In the review committee of course. All the organisation had to do was publish the margins and thresholds and that whole problem (and the review committee) went away.

If the organisation is serious at empowerment, they need to be looking at how to give up control. How to remove approvals. How to break down silos. How to make hidden information visible. How to ensure that people have the right skills. How to ensure that wrong decisions are reviewed and responded to with additional training, support and information rather than punishments. In short, how does the organisation build an environment that supports empowerment.

Empowerment is not something that can be given. All the organisation can do is encourage people to pick it up. They do so by creating an environment that supports and encourages people to make decisions. That's hard work. It's much easier to just hand out an empowerment card (or equivalent) and think that the job is done. But if you put in the effort and build the right environment, you will find that you don’t actually need to empower people. They will empower themselves. People who feel safe and well supported, with the right information and skills to hand, will reach out and take empowerment without having to be told.