Staff Empowerment: What it is, What it isn’t, How it works and Why Empowerment Often Fails

by rictownsend

Job Vacancy Indonesia, Employee, Vacancy

Empowering workers, means truly giving them more authority to make decisions and then act upon them and that’s where many empowerment programs break down. Many (I suggest most) mangers are happy to delegate responsibility however they are reluctant to hand over any real authority. Lack of authority for competent staff can leave them frustrated and stifled, particularly if they are not being permitted to have any input into their work. In my experience the expert in the job is most often the person doing it, rather than the manger controlling the overall workflow and therefore constant staff input into work methods and problem solving is essential for empowerment to work.

One article (“smartmanager.com”) I read suggested that “Empowering people is closely aligned with facilitative leadership.” Essentially facilitative leadership is all about helping your staff reach their potential and therefore improve operations. The article continued “If you look at leadership skills along a continuum from persuasion, through collaboration to facilitation, most managers would be required to engage a variety of approaches at different times”. If you take the “Situational Leadership” (Hershey Blanchard) approach of course you would only pass on authority to an individual in the task area in which they are fully competent.

An essential ingredient for any empowerment is an effective training process which tests for competence. As well as the technical skill training you will need to ensure staff have access to the information they require to make confident decisions plus a clear understanding of their boundaries. In addition you must develop a culture of accepting mistakes or errors of judgement as being a legitimate part of the learning process. Obviously one of the boundaries needs to be that the same mistake twice is not acceptable.

Empowerment can be a gradual process. As an example as a lease manager when I worked for a finance company some years ago empowerment for my staff could mean that staff member “A” was able do lease quotes and a second staff member “B” would then check them. The real empowerment came when member A was granted the right to check the quotes and give the quote to the customer. As a checker you had both responsibility for the accuracy and the authority to act. Similarly, when granting loans was the issue, the first step was to give the staff member the right to decline loans to see what the lending competence was. Lending approval limits where then given (real authority) after reviewing the loans that the staff member had declined.

Empowerment of course is not for everyone. Some years ago I had the opportunity to watch as a large international/US hotel company tried to introduce an empowerment program worldwide. I was living on an island in Malaysia at the time and the staff to be empowered where “locals”, mostly from the island itself. These people were bought up in a culture of “do what you’re told” with a strong religious tradition that reinforced compliance to strict rules that to my mind limited the development of their emotional intelligence. The program was a complete disaster for this particular hotel. The empowerment of staff will only occur and be effective if the staff are willing to take authority. Don’t get me wrong they all craved status (manager on their business card) however they definitely did not want either authority or responsibility for outcomes. Emotional intelligence as well as technical skill should be assessed before any though of empowerment can be undertaken.

Finally many see delegation as empowerment and it is not. Sure delegating is part of the overall process however there is much more to real empowerment.

For the employer: (as “about dot com”) puts it, “Empowerment is the process of enabling or [and] authorizing an individual to think, behave, take action, and control work and decisionmaking in autonomous ways”. For the employee: “It is the state of feeling self-empowered to take control of one’s own destiny”.

Here are a few issues you will need to address if you a setting up an empowerment program:

Assign tasks that will allow your subordinates to grow.

Explain why task being assigned to them and highlight “what’s in it for them.”?

Give very clear and detailed directions (the what, where, why, how and when of the tasks) and allow and encourage questions.?

Introduce the empowerment process in stages and allow reasonable time for the process.

Demonstrate that you trust those you are empowering or those process will be nothing more than a waste of time and energy.

Solicit suggestions from your employees as to better ways of completing the project.

Follow up on progress, act as coach however don’t constantly look over their shoulder and always be accessible when those being empowered need help.

Pay a great deal of attention to ensuring employees feel (and are) rewarded and recognized for empowered behavior.