Does empowerment reinforce an outdated paradigm, or does moving away from the term obfuscate the reality of how most organisations operate?
- Understand your team: When you give people control over the way they work, a one-size-fits-all management style is out of the question. You will need to work out which employees need what levels of support. Some will be happiest with minimal input, others will need a much more hands-on approach. This is also driven by the type of work they are doing, so a situational approach is essential.
- Prioritise accountability: Empowerment is not going to help anything without accountability. Employees need to be aware that although they now have control over the process, they are accountable for the results of that process. This is not to create a culture of blame, but to create an environment of learning and growth. Empowering employees is a performance improver, not just an employee engagement strategy.
- Create feedback loops: Empowered employees need ongoing feedback on their processes and outcomes, but they also need the opportunity to give leaders feedback on a regular basis so they are managed in the way that suits them best.
- Build trust: Attempting to empower teams without high levels of trust between the team and its management will lead to micro-management and team members feeling undervalued. Transparency around your own work and the thought processes that go into decisions which affect your team help to build a high-trust environment.
- Open communication: This ties into the feedback point, but it is important that you make yourself available for your team so that they feel the lines of communication are open and they can access support when necessary. If your time is really limited, practices like holding open office hours are an option.
- Don’t empower anybody! Is ’empowering’ employees the right path to take?
- From the Post*Shift blog; To leverage one of most powerful tools for change in their organisation, empower your intranet managers.
- 6 eye-openers on moving towards a self-managed organisation from Buurtzorg’s Jos de Blok.
- As some companies step back from their self-management experiments, should we expect employees to be increasingly empowered in the future, or should we always expect to have a boss at work?
- When empowering employees works, and when it doesn’t, from Harvard Business Review