A tale is told of a man in Paris during the upheaval in 1948, who saw a friend marching after a crowd toward the barricades. Warning him that these could not be held against the troops, that he had better keep way, he received this reply, ” I must follow them. I am their leader.”
A Lawrence Lowell, 1856-1943, President of Harvard University
Empowerment. According to the dictionary is means to “give someone power or authority” or “to give somebody a greater sense of confidence or self esteem”. In the workplace or leadership research and books (countless of them) the term has been used in the assumption that each person/employee should take personal responsibility for his or her own well-being and to do what one thinks is best for the organization – calling it self-empowerment
This is tricky for leaders as our focus is on quality, productivity, and cost effectiveness. So why would a leader want to hand power over to employees? Maybe because today the idea of empowerment has become tied closely with efficiency in an organization as an answer for how to do more with less. Peter Block made note of the shift in a reprint of his book, The Empowered Manager, that “…the promise of empowerment is that it will dramatically increase the sense of responsibility and ownership at every level of the organization, especially at the bottom, where products and services are delivered to customers…”. Nancy Lublin, in an article in Fast Company , talks about the obsessive focus in organizations on leadership and the minimal focus on the workers or “followers” who turn the visions into reality. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/144/do-something-lets-hear-it-forthe-little-guys.html
So what’s the difference between empowering your people and hands-off or macro-managing them? And is there a fine between empowering your people and what can perceived as negligence as a leader? Author/consultant, Bruce Tulgan, challenges that the hands-off approach is just a recipe for setting them up for failure and that poeple need to have expectations spelled out for them and receive guidance, directions and support to be successful (Rainmaker Thinking Inc)
So how do we know as leaders what is the right level of leadership at the right time for the right situation? For me it is in knowing and practicing the various leadership styles to be able to match the needs of my employees with my approach and the level of guidance or direction. And believe me it feels like I am feeling my way and learning the appropriate style every day in every work situation. I even am practicing this in dealing with my father as we struggle our way through unknown situations with his cancer and treatments. Somedays I am talking to a rational, proactive adult who I respect and look up to and other days to what seems to be a spoiled 6 year old who does not want to listen. Challenging. There is so much more to learn and practice about situational leadership in my life.
“The best leader is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and the self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.”—Theodore Roosevelt
So let’s hear… what say you on the subject?
As always, Let’s Keep the Conversation Going….
Best regards,
Sandi
I love the discussion, Sandi! For me, the ultimate goal of leadership is to work with ourselves, our colleagues, our employees and even our clients, to an empowered path. As you state, this empowerment ebbs and flows depending on the situation. For example, someone new to the organization or new to a role needs more guidance and direction. But even in these situations, I think there are opportunities to empower. Perhaps it’s empowering in the ‘how’ versus the ‘what.’
I believe empowerment leads to productivity, creativity, innovation, happiness and even sustainability in an organization. I wonder how many of us truly embrace the empowerment that is available for the taking? Do we engage in our work, or even personal environment, in a way that is truly empowering for us? For me, this is an interesting question that I continue to ask myself, checking in to see where that human fear factor we all have shows up, and how I can stay true to my leadership goal of acting from an empowered state in every situation.
I found the collapsing and absence of distinctions in this piece frustrating. To start with is the dictionary definition of empowerment. Authorizing someone is distinctly different that what has arisen in the past 30+ years about the transpersonal aspects of empowerment, and the subsequent inner sense of being “empowered.” Authorizing others has been an inherent phenomenon as long as there have been hierarchical organizations, based on internal policy/legal/power considerations, allowing people to act and speak on behalf of someone higher/more powerful in the system. Furthermore, one does not delegate responsibility, but can act in ways that hold subordinates accountable for what they do or produce, including whether they act responsibly.
While empowering another may fall under this in a dictionary, most people, including another respondent to this blog, take it in its more “transformative” sense. The authorizing part may come from a leader or manager (to bring up that distinction). While people can be managers and leaders simultaneously, managing is what the organization authorizes and mandated people in organizations to do, and in corporations there are extensive policy and legal aspects to this. One cannot mandate leadership. It is an outcome of personal characteristics and interpersonal responses/dynamics. You may be mandated to be my subordinate (or vice versa), but the status of leadership is earned and/or granted by the people involved.
Peter Senge articulated a hierarchy of “statuses” for a given subordinate that corresponded to the shifts in degrees of willingness to perform task(s) at hand. At the bottom was something like coercion — you will do it because I can make you. Above that is compliance, and so forth through cooperation. Above cooperation he drew a line. That line indicates a shift in internal state for performing the task. First above the line was commitment — the beginning stage when the subordinate demonstrates an internal motivation other than just what the “boss” wants for what is to be done. Higher yet is ownership, wherein the subordinate is capable and further committed to the achievement in question independent of direction given, even if the person who assigned the task is no longer with the organization. I would submit that this last stage is a characteristic of empowerment in its more modern and transformative sense.
There are hundreds of books and articles written about all this, and no short statement here can account for all the distinctions, discussion, and wisdom about these matters, and they can’t all be addressed here. But I think attention to some of the above is more central than “hands on” or not in macro situations, or referring to leadership in the absence or management in macro situations.
I appreciate the T. R. quote, and it calls to mind a sentence from Drucker on defining the core aspects management, i.e. to capitalize on people’s strengths and to make their weaknesses irrelevant. I think what good leadership does is help people display and act on strengths they have but which may have been dormant, thus adding to greater possibilities for all involved.