Employee empowerment has long been considered a key practice in the leader’s toolkit to be used to increase motivation, efficiency and personal satisfaction with work. This approach can be used as a great morale booster.
What is Empowerment?
I have always found empowerment a great buzz word of the day. One of those uses of the English language where changing the label of a thing can elevate it’s status and gain attention.
Empowerment is simply the practice of clearly defining, and then most importantly, communicating the individual workers accountability and the box of authority around those accountabilities. That is to say, you are accountable for this and here is your latitude for discretionary decision making around these responsibilities. If something comes up outside these boundaries this is how it is handled.
Basically the more discretionary latitude, the greater the level of empowerment.
What’s the problem?
Where most organizations fall down is with the definition and clear communication of accountability and associated authority latitude. This came to be defined as the “empowerment” challenge by many organizations. In fact the problem was simply a lack of clear direction – both what you are supposed to do and what the limits are and the expectations associated with this.
A number of highly motivated individuals I worked with over the years used to get around the empowerment problem by acting and then asking for forgiveness later. As long the actions did not bridge on criminal activities or have significant costs associated with them (six figures) then this approach worked pretty consistently.
So to all you organizations with perceived empowerment problems take a look at you accountability profiles and authority limits. You might be able to solve the problem more easily than you thought.
