12 Requirements for Powerful Empowerment
Permission-askers don’t feel powerful. Permission-giving keeps people in line and subservient.
Power hungry leaders create disempowering cultures. Do the people around you feel powerful?
The person giving permission is the person in control.
Empowerment is gibberish until people believe it’s safe to act without permission.
The proof of empowerment is the absence of meddlesome intervention.
Empowerment elevates the status of others.
Empowered not disconnected:
Empowered team members need access and connection to leadership, not control.
Successful empowerment is collaborative, not isolated. Updates are more important when team members are empowered. Leaders need to keep their finger on the pulse of organizational life.
Employees who balk at giving updates are siloed, kingdom builders. Empowerment isn’t permission to do whatever you want. Help people connect:
- Paint the big picture.
- Show them where they fit in.
- Expect alignment with organizational mission.
3 enemies of empowerment:
- Frequent interventions.
- Foggy goals.
- Fearful leaders.
12 requirements for powerful empowerment:
- Confident leaders who elevate others. The people at the top have the most power to make people feel safe. Fearful workers reflect controlling leaders.
- Frequent feedback given in small doses.
- Clear boundaries. Transparency regarding nonnegotiable policies, for example.
- Predictable responses to failure.
- Structures that protect against catastrophic failure.
- Reluctant intervention from leadership.
- Team members who know and leverage their strengths and weaknesses.
- Shared values. Strongly aligned values are the foundation of trustworthy empowerment. Never give power to those who don’t share your values.
- Clear vision. Empowerment is chaos apart from clear vision.
- Short-term goals that provide daily direction.
- Shared and agreed upon accountability.
- Taking responsibility as well as authority. Empowered people own and fix their own screw ups. Running to mommy-leader to make everything OK reinforces helplessness.
What are the enemies of empowerment?
What must be in place for team members to feel powerful?
I think the times when I haven’t empowered people, it’s usually due to me be lazy.
Thanks billgncs. You make me think that empowering others takes work! 🙂 It’s definitely harder at the beginning, for sure!
when you empower others, it means to embrace change. That’s work for sure.
Another good post Dan.
It used to be that we lived in a world where it was only tyrant men the world needed to worry about. We no longer live in that world. Now we also have to contend with what I would call the ‘queen bee’ types and the equivalent of ‘mommy dearest’ leaders who create just as much of an unhealthy dynamic in organizational cultures as the dictator ‘boys’ do/did.
No matter the gender, bad leadership is bad leadership. It results in distrust and toxic environments.
Empowerment IS a worthy goal. It takes trust and it also takes knowing what the workable parameters are given the vision/mission/goals/environment. It also involves getting a grasp or idea on what ‘rules’ CAN be pushed when needed, etc. (the kind still in alignment with overall objectives, etc)
There’s far more I can say on this, however, I know you love brevity. 😉
Bottom line though it is this. Any time we’re dealing with someone who MUST win at all costs. MUST be first. MUST be ‘on top’. And considers anyone else as remotely ‘autonomous’ as a threat to that…will not have ’empowered’ people in the environment.
Powerful comment Samantha. The nugget in your third paragraph is powerful. Some areas of organizational life can be pushed. Others areas are hard barriers. Establish the playground and then go play hard.
Regarding brevity: I wonder if two short comments is better than one long. 🙂
After playing taxi for kidlets and commenting on Steve’s latest post, it led to this additional thought….
Warning: what I’m about to say could be easily misconstrued and taken out of a context so I’ll follow up with some qualifiers. That said..
Not everyone SHOULD be an ‘official’ leader of a team, org, or company.
I know, I know…we talk about PERSONAL leadership and yes, self responsibility is necessary yada yada yada.
Also has nothing to do with gender. There are people in this world that should NOT be in a position of leadership because they are dangerous. And there are people who simply don’t have what it takes to effectively lead others. The latter of which CAN change with time and experience. The former…less so.
For a more visual context on the former. Think of the scene in the movie Gladiator where Marcus speaks to Maximum privately about his own son and says, (from memory so forgive if not verbatim) ‘Commodus is not a moral man, you’ve known this since you were young. Commodus MUST NOT RULE! He CANNOT RULE!’
Not everyone is ‘called’ to leadership. Has nothing to do with being LESS THEN. It has to do what people are equipped for. etc.
This is all good stuff! True, very true.
Had to reblog this
I spit out my tea when I got to the part about running to mommy-leader! Thanks for the chuckle Dan!
Diana
I like what you say. “empowerment”, Diversity” etc are some of the most common buzz words these days
Do whatever God tells you to do. I spent 90 k on a Masters degree in archaeology to become atheist, meet my fiance, and become a financial manager for a home health aid business. Follow your heart and trust in Gos. Psychological or not, trust in Him.
You’ve already said fearful leaders but what about angry leaders? Those leaders who blow up at any little mistake? Those are an enemy of empowerment as well.
Far too many times “empowerment” is merely used as a catch-phrase. Without true commitment, belief and follow-through there is no empowerment.
This is reasonable and I subscribe to the concept. But I know of too many successful companies that continue to grow because the leader has the vision and the drive and alllll the power. The leader uses fear to squeeze what he/she needs out of employees and then, when employee can’t give anymore, or misses too many targets, they are out and the new replacement is positioned in the vice grip.
This approach works both in the short term and in the long term. I wish that wasn’t so, but the evidence suggests otherwise–which is precisely why I work alone as a consultant.
to Joe Lalande: Anger is a secondary emotion. Fear is primary. Leaders are angry/project anger as a protection tactic to anyone questioning their authority.
Sounds a lot like something we do on Lean called ‘Hoshin Kanri” – creating an engaged culture … ensuring there is a line of sight from the front line to the vision of the organization and that every individual is empowered to change his/her processes to ensure that vision is achieved … meaning the culture allows risk taking … mistakes are learning opportunities – the culture is one of problem solving – silos are removed – very hard work – it involves “middle management” letting go — no micro management rather delegation … good caching skills can go a long way at this point – the outcomes can be phenomenal …
This post was truly enlightening. I can’t wait to share with my friends in management. I left a position where it felt as though my boss was more dictatorial than effective, and that’s why I didn’t feel empowered as an employee. I don’t think he felt empowered as an employer, either.
Alexa – http://www.newlywednotdead.com
My Motto: don’t ask permission – request forgiveness. Goes right along with “learn from your mistakes”, if you can’t assert yourself, how will you learn?
Power and control are maintained in both subtle and obvious ways in an organization. When organizations remain hierarchical and seek the ‘in-put’ of subordinates without really empowering their voice, there is really not collaborative leadership. I really like the notion of ‘relational leading.’
https://www.academia.edu/2377652/Budget_in_Excel