As leaders one of the greatest legacies we can create is, an Empowered Organisation.
One of the challenges with empowerment, and why I suspect so many leaders shy away from it, is that in order to empower people, we have to give up some our power.
To delegate that power to our teams: to allow them to make their own decisions; to take accountability for their success; and to let them to become self sufficient.
One of the best bosses I ever worked for was very strong in this area. He was the first person to teach me about self sufficiency and empowerment, and it is something that has stayed with me, and that I look to pass on to my teams.
Every time I went to him with a problem, we repeated the same process:
- I’d explain to him the problem;
- Then he would say, what do you think would be the best thing to do?;
- I would give him my suggestion;
- He would say great idea, let’s do it.
About the third or fourth time I went to see him, he said yes, “what can I do for you?”.
I said “we have a problem”, he looked at me quizzically, and smiled.
I said, “yes, I am going to tell you we have a problem; you will ask me what we should do; I will tell you; and then you will say ok, go do it”.
He said “Yes, that’s pretty much whats going to happen, so what do you conclude.”
I said, “I conclude that we don’t need to have this conversation. That I have the solution and can solve this on my own”.
He said, “Great, usually this takes a little longer, but well done. You know more about the details than I do; so more likely than not you will know the right thing to do, better than me. I am here to say well done when you do that, and to provide support for when you don’t know what to do”.
He understood that his job: was to let me do my job, not to do mine for me; to help me grow to become self-sufficient; and to make himself redundant.
He was confident in his own ability to do his own job, that he didn’t need to keep helping me do mine.
I often think that some leaders lack confidence, and need to be involved in that level of detail, in order to prove their value.
Good leaders empower their teams; they trust them to do their jobs; they make themselves become redundant.
This doesn’t mean that we abandon our teams and leave them to their own devices.
It means that we need to build their confidence in their own abilities, empower to use those abilities, and then stand back and applaud their success.
That’s leadership.
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Empowerment offers the potential for tapping into a wellspring of underutilized human capacity, but it calls for changes in most aspects of an organization.
Unfortunately, many managers do not understand that empowerment involves releasing the power people already have, neither that it’s a learning process, nor a shift of mind set for all.
Empowerment is a top down, values driven issue, and it starts with the belief system of top management.
I think the most critical issue is the perceived difference in people’s positions. The difference between being superior and subordinate. Every manager has to confront habits, traditions, and hierarchical thinking.
Everything you do is to help your employees be more effective. You rely on expertise and relationships and people taking responsibility for their own actions.
When employees really understand that you trust them and they trust your commitment to empowerment, their own sense of responsibility kicks in, and you have got something really powerful.
Thanks Gordon. Thor
I completely agree that creating an empowered organization really is the best legacy a leader can leave. Delegation is one form of empowerment which means “giving up” some of our power and that’s a challenge for many leaders as you’ve pointed out. It’s also about giving up control – and our need to control is both hard wired into our personalities, reinforced by the organizational environment’s we all work in. Indeed our research with the LMAP 360 clearly shows that Need to Control is negatively correlated with Leadership effectiveness. So learning to let go of control – switching to a post rather than pre control mindset – is fundamentally important to create an empowered organization.
And as you’ve pointed out, besides delegation, we have to help our teams build their confidence in their abilities. “Motivational” empowerment is based on boosting individual’s self-efficacy beliefs – their confidence in the competence to undertake challenging tasks, their sense of personal agency and control to perform them and their belief that with effort they will achieve a successful outcome. By reframing my job as a leader to be focused on boosting people’s self-efficacy beliefs rather than managing performance, an empowered organisation can become a reality.
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