This page contains quotes from the article EMPOWERMENT - THE WAY TO CREATE EFFICIENT ORGANIZATIONS WITH A HUMAN FACE by Imre Lövey

WHY EMPOWERMENT?

 Empowered organizations give their employees much more independence, decision making authority and responsibility than their traditional counterparts. These organizations rely on self-directed work teams empowered, within certain limits, to make decisions that managers reserve for themselves in traditional organizations.

At the same time, empowerment is neither a radically new nor a recent idea. It is firmly rooted in such historic concepts as the human relations school, participative management, delegation, teamwork, and autonomous workgroups. All of these concepts embody certain aspects and attributes of empowerment.

The advantages of empowerment

Empowered organizations have at least three significant advantages over their traditional counterparts:

 

1. At all organizational levels, employees use their creative mental powers much more efficiently. In contrast, most of this creativity lies fallow in traditional organizations where bosses make most of the decisions and subordinates are only expected to support and implement them.

 

2. As a result, empowered employees generate lots of cost saving and quality improving ideas. This, in turn, directly improves the organization’s competitiveness.

3. Empowered organizations have much flatter organizational hierarchies. This follows from the reduced need to escalate decision-making up the hierarchy. Flatter organizations have two crucial benefits:

a) They are much cheaper to run. Empowered organizations can shed a lot of managers who are no longer needed to control and supervise people and make decisions for them;

b) They are also much nimbler. While highly structured, bureaucratic organizations spawn individuals and teams that are often busy proving their importance, competing and seeking the boss’ favor, empowered organizations focus their employees’ attention to solving problems. In addition, these employees enjoy a fairly high degree of autonomy regardless of their job title, and have better opportunities to grow.

What are the tools, skills, processes and steps required for successfully setting up empowered organizations or self-directed work teams?

THE DEVELOPMENT OF EFFECTIVE SELF-DIRECTED WORK TEAMS

1. COMMON GOALS: acceptance, commitment

The development process of effective self-directed work teams starts with the members’ agreeing with, accepting and committing to a set of common goals. Such a lack of alignment will create problems down the line and provoke managers to seize direct control and start micro managing the team.
  In order to have the team agree on its goals, it must be involved in their selection, definition and eventual modification. The strength of the team’s commitment is directly proportional to its involvement in all these steps.

2. BOUNDARIES, GIVENS, LIMITATIONS: awareness and acceptance

Second, the team must be aware of and accept its boundaries, givens and limitations. Lots of autonomous work teams get into trouble when the team’s all-embracing democracy blinds them to the boundaries, givens and limitations their environment imposes on them. Such non-negotiable conditions may include work schedules, safety rules and budgets. A number of conditions must be accepted as given for a particular timeframe and teams can waste a lot of energy trying to negotiate them.
Make sure the whole team understands the nature of and the reasons for givens and limitations. Involve outsiders in this step, if necessary. Team members can not be expected to comply with limitations they don’t see, understand or accept.

3. ROLES: identifying internal roles and responsibilities

Once the team has understood and accepted external givens and limitations, it has to identify internal roles, responsibilities, decision making authorities and work sharing rules. Everybody must clearly see how they contribute to reaching the team’s common goals. What support do they give to and need from other team members.

4. NORMS AND VALUES

Next, the team must develop a common set of norms and values. These represent the team’s day-to-day interaction protocol that all members must agree with, accept and follow.
  The process of developing these norms and values is at least as important as the final result. It is through discussions, encounters and common thinking that team members internalize these values. Simply issuing the team with a ready-made system of norms and values in writing is counterproductive and futile. Team members will not own, nor have the motivation to observe and apply norms and values they have not helped to shape and develop.

5. INTERNALIZED DISCIPLINE

Finally, the team needs internalized discipline for its successful operation. Interestingly, advocates of people-focused management practices tend to shun this word. They feel discipline is an attribute of authoritative or traditional management styles. In reality, however, discipline is at least as important for empowered teams as it is for traditional organizations. The difference is that traditional managers impose and enforce, while empowered teams willingly assume and internalize discipline.

  Internalized discipline means the following four things for empowered teams and their members:

• they abide by the rules and norms they jointly developed and accepted,
• they feel responsible for carrying out the tasks that follow from their roles,
• they observe all known givens and limitations, and
• they act to reach the goals they have defined and set together.

 Internalized discipline also implies a knowledge of consequences in two areas:

• what are the negative consequences for the team and the organization of ignoring givens and limitations, and violating norms and values, and
• what are the positive or negative consequences for the individual of observing or violating givens and norms.

 

CREATING SELF-DIRECTED TEAMS AND EMPOWERED ORGANIZATIONS

Obviously, such organizations do not form spontaneously. Three basic conditions are required for the creation of self-directed teams and empowered organizations:

1. leadership,

2. training, and

3. regular retreats or “camp meetings” where the team can look at itself in perspective.

1. Leadership.

Empowerment does not mean that empowered teams have no leaders. On the contrary: such teams must have leaders who know the concepts, understand empowerment and have all the skills to guide the team through the path of becoming self-directed. To take the steps outlined in the previous chapter the team needs a certain amount of outside help, inspiration and facilitation. Leaders play a key role here. 

 2. This takes us to the second basic condition: training.

Obviously, it must start with management. Top management must truly understand what empowerment is, how such an organization looks and works, what are its benefits and drawbacks, what is management’s role in creating an empowered organizational culture, when they should and when they should not intervene, and what support and facilitation skills they specifically need.

  At the same time, team members also need training in the skills and mindsets required for empowerment. Empowered organizations require much higher levels of drive, initiative, responsibility, and cooperation than their traditionally run counterparts. People accustomed to the old ways cannot be expected to grasp the essence of empowerment and make the transition overnight. Although the required skills are there, lying dormant in most of us, we need to recognize, activate and further develop them.
  Unfortunately, both members and leaders tend to lose their initial enthusiasm and faith when the team runs into serious trouble for the first time. Instead of trying to find new ways to solve their problems, they tend to slip back to old patterns of behavior and apply old remedies. Prolonged periods of such stagnation and regression, however, lead to cynicism and distrust. In such cases restarting the process of empowerment becomes a much harder task.

3. The third basic condition is holding regular retreats or camp meetings where the team can distance itself from its daily work and look at the foundations of its operation. The team might discuss the following topics during these retreats:

• Are the goals clear and acceptable to everyone on the team?
• What are the results we can be proud of?
• What recurrent problems do we have and how could we solve them?
• What about our norms and values? Are they still current? Do we still follow them? Or should we revise them?
• How about our internalized discipline? Etc.

  Here’s what you can do to make these retreats more successful: Hold more frequent retreats during the initial period of the team’s formation. Follow them up at regular intervals. Make sure the team does not spend its time examining operating details during retreats. Focus instead on fundamental issues and make decisions about these. And remember that such retreats also have a crucial team-building and motivating role, regardless of the specific topics discussed.

Who is Empowerment for?

 It is a widely held belief that empowered organizations can only be formed and run with highly educated and intelligent people. Experience, however, does not support this belief. It shows, instead, that the formation and success of self-directed work teams is more related to management attitudes and organizational culture than to academic qualifications.
Self-directed work teams have been successful among assembly line workers, for example. These teams select their own leaders who act more like facilitators and coaches than traditional bosses. Such teams also make their own decisions about a number of issues, such as work and vacation schedules, shift rotation, stopping the line in the case of quality problems, safety issues, cost saving proposals, innovations, etc.

What is Empowerment unsuitable for?

 Of course, empowerment should not be used as an excuse to withhold pay raises and pay staff below market equity. People will cotton on to such abuses sooner rather than later and such empowerment programs will explode in the face of their creators.

THE HUMAN ASPECT

We have not yet seen, however, one very important aspect of such teams and organizations. We are talking about the human aspect.
Empowered organizations make their members feel more like full human beings. Human beings who can walk tall. Human beings who need not feel like second or third rate people just because they work on the lower rungs of the organization’s hierarchy. Empowered people can feel freer, more valuable and more in control than their colleagues in traditional organizations. And since we spend most of our wakeful hours working, it does matter how we relate to the environment, others and ourselves on the job.

Therefore, empowered organizations are not just more productive, efficient and competitive. Empowerment, the very tool which releases so much intellectual power, ability and creativity, makes them more human as well. And this should matter to leaders and businessmen who care about ethical norms and values.

Coaching and Empowerment

Coaching is a part of the Empowerment process inasmuch as it uses unique non-directive techniques to give the clients more and more power and independence in solving their own problems. Read more about coaching and Concordia’s related activities under the menu item About Coaching.

The advantages of empowerment

Empowered organizations have at least three significant advantages over their traditional counterparts:

• At all organizational levels, employees use their creative mental powers much more efficiently. In contrast, most of this creativity lies fallow in traditional organizations where bosses make most of the decisions and subordinates are only expected to support and implement them.
• As a result, empowered employees generate lots of cost saving and quality improving ideas. This, in turn, directly improves the organization’s competitiveness.
• Empowered organizations have much flatter organizational hierarchies. This follows from the reduced need to escalate decision-making up the hierarchy. Flatter organizations have two crucial benefits:

a) They are much cheaper to run. Empowered organizations can shed a lot of managers who are no longer needed to control and supervise people and make decisions for them;

b) They are also much nimbler. While highly structured, bureaucratic organizations spawn individuals and teams that are often busy proving their importance, competing and seeking the boss’ favor, empowered organizations focus their employees’ attention to solving problems. In addition, these employees enjoy a fairly high degree of autonomy regardless of their job title, and have better opportunities to grow.

What are the tools, skills, processes and steps required for successfully setting up empowered organizations or self-directed work teams?

THE DEVELOPMENT OF EFFECTIVE SELF-DIRECTED WORK TEAMS

1. COMMON GOALS: acceptance, commitment

The development process of effective self-directed work teams starts with the members’ agreeing with, accepting and committing to a set of common goals. Such a lack of alignment will create problems down the line and provoke managers to seize direct control and start micro managing the team.
In order to have the team agree on its goals, it must be involved in their selection, definition and eventual modification. The strength of the team’s commitment is directly proportional to its involvement in all these steps.

2. BOUNDARIES, GIVENS, LIMITATIONS: awareness and acceptance

Second, the team must be aware of and accept its boundaries, givens and limitations. Lots of autonomous work teams get into trouble when the team’s all-embracing democracy blinds them to the boundaries, givens and limitations their environment imposes on them. Such non-negotiable conditions may include work schedules, safety rules and budgets. A number of conditions must be accepted as given for a particular timeframe and teams can waste a lot of energy trying to negotiate them.
Make sure the whole team understands the nature of and the reasons for givens and limitations. Involve outsiders in this step, if necessary. Team members can not be expected to comply with limitations they don’t see, understand or accept.

3. ROLES: identifying internal roles and responsibilities

Once the team has understood and accepted external givens and limitations, it has to identify internal roles, responsibilities, decision making authorities and work sharing rules. Everybody must clearly see how they contribute to reaching the team’s common goals. What support do they give to and need from other team members.

4. NORMS AND VALUES

Next, the team must develop a common set of norms and values. These represent the team’s day-to-day interaction protocol that all members must agree with, accept and follow.
The process of developing these norms and values is at least as important as the final result. It is through discussions, encounters and common thinking that team members internalize these values. Simply issuing the team with a ready-made system of norms and values in writing is counterproductive and futile. Team members will not own, nor have the motivation to observe and apply norms and values they have not helped to shape and develop.

5. INTERNALIZED DISCIPLINE

Finally, the team needs internalized discipline for its successful operation. Interestingly, advocates of people-focused management practices tend to shun this word. They feel discipline is an attribute of authoritative or traditional management styles. In reality, however, discipline is at least as important for empowered teams as it is for traditional organizations. The difference is that traditional managers impose and enforce, while empowered teams willingly assume and internalize discipline.

Internalized discipline means the following four things for empowered teams and their members:

• they abide by the rules and norms they jointly developed and accepted,
• they feel responsible for carrying out the tasks that follow from their roles,
• they observe all known givens and limitations, and
• they act to reach the goals they have defined and set together.

Internalized discipline also implies a knowledge of consequences in two areas:

• what are the negative consequences for the team and the organization of ignoring givens and limitations, and violating norms and values, and
• what are the positive or negative consequences for the individual of observing or violating givens and norms.

CREATING SELF-DIRECTED TEAMS AND EMPOWERED ORGANIZATIONS

Obviously, such organizations do not form spontaneously. Three basic conditions are required for the creation of self-directed teams and empowered organizations:

1. leadership,

2. training, and

3. regular retreats or “camp meetings” where the team can look at itself in perspective.

1. Leadership.

Empowerment does not mean that empowered teams have no leaders. On the contrary: such teams must have leaders who know the concepts, understand empowerment and have all the skills to guide the team through the path of becoming self-directed. To take the steps outlined in the previous chapter the team needs a certain amount of outside help, inspiration and facilitation. Leaders play a key role here.

2. This takes us to the second basic condition: training.

Obviously, it must start with management. Top management must truly understand what empowerment is, how such an organization looks and works, what are its benefits and drawbacks, what is management’s role in creating an empowered organizational culture, when they should and when they should not intervene, and what support and facilitation skills they specifically need.

At the same time, team members also need training in the skills and mindsets required for empowerment. Empowered organizations require much higher levels of drive, initiative, responsibility, and cooperation than their traditionally run counterparts. People accustomed to the old ways cannot be expected to grasp the essence of empowerment and make the transition overnight. Although the required skills are there, lying dormant in most of us, we need to recognize, activate and further develop them.
Unfortunately, both members and leaders tend to lose their initial enthusiasm and faith when the team runs into serious trouble for the first time. Instead of trying to find new ways to solve their problems, they tend to slip back to old patterns of behavior and apply old remedies. Prolonged periods of such stagnation and regression, however, lead to cynicism and distrust. In such cases restarting the process of empowerment becomes a much harder task.


3. The third basic condition is holding regular retreats or camp meetings where the team can distance itself from its daily work and look at the foundations of its operation. The team might discuss the following topics during these retreats:

• Are the goals clear and acceptable to everyone on the team?
• What are the results we can be proud of?
• What recurrent problems do we have and how could we solve them?
• What about our norms and values? Are they still current? Do we still follow them? Or should we revise them?
• How about our internalized discipline? Etc.

Here’s what you can do to make these retreats more successful: Hold more frequent retreats during the initial period of the team’s formation. Follow them up at regular intervals. Make sure the team does not spend its time examining operating details during retreats. Focus instead on fundamental issues and make decisions about these. And remember that such retreats also have a crucial team-building and motivating role, regardless of the specific topics discussed.

Who is Empowerment for?

It is a widely held belief that empowered organizations can only be formed and run with highly educated and intelligent people. Experience, however, does not support this belief. It shows, instead, that the formation and success of self-directed work teams is more related to management attitudes and organizational culture than to academic qualifications.
Self-directed work teams have been successful among assembly line workers, for example. These teams select their own leaders who act more like facilitators and coaches than traditional bosses. Such teams also make their own decisions about a number of issues, such as work and vacation schedules, shift rotation, stopping the line in the case of quality problems, safety issues, cost saving proposals, innovations, etc.

What is Empowerment unsuitable for?

Of course, empowerment should not be used as an excuse to withhold pay raises and pay staff below market equity. People will cotton on to such abuses sooner rather than later and such empowerment programs will explode in the face of their creators.

THE HUMAN ASPECT

We have not yet seen, however, one very important aspect of such teams and organizations. We are talking about the human aspect.
Empowered organizations make their members feel more like full human beings. Human beings who can walk tall. Human beings who need not feel like second or third rate people just because they work on the lower rungs of the organization’s hierarchy. Empowered people can feel freer, more valuable and more in control than their colleagues in traditional organizations. And since we spend most of our wakeful hours working, it does matter how we relate to the environment, others and ourselves on the job.

Therefore, empowered organizations are not just more productive, efficient and competitive. Empowerment, the very tool which releases so much intellectual power, ability and creativity, makes them more human as well. And this should matter to leaders and businessmen who care about ethical norms and values.

Coaching and Empowerment

Coaching is a part of the Empowerment process inasmuch as it uses unique non-directive techniques to give the clients more and more power and independence in solving their own problems. Read more about coaching and Concordia’s related activities under the menu item About Coaching.