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When It Comes
to Empowerment, Are You Shifting Power Or Simply Passing the Buck?
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by
Charles J. Latino
President
& Founder of Reliabiltiy Center, Inc.
Plant
Engineering, May 1998
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Many corporate executives see empowerment, stewardship, and benchmarking
as the way to a healthy future. Like most modern management theories, these
concepts have merit in principle. Too often, however, they fall short of
expectations in execution. |
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Certainly the vision of people in a creative environment working hard to
match or exceed the performance of their competitors is enticing and worthwhile.
Cutting organizational levels to increase the accuracy and speed of communications
is a step toward shaping a creative environment. Establishing business
centers that encompass manufacturing as well as marketing and sales is
also desirable because it fosters cooperation instead of blame-placing. |
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Why, then, does the innately worthwhile concept of empowerment too frequently
fail to achieve its intended results? Six steps are essential before empowerment
can work effectively: |
Establish a long-term
purpose and vision
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Carefully select those
to be empowered and define what they are empowered to do
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Recognize and build upon
the existing base of experience in the company
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Train adequately
those expected to assume power and responsibility
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Create genuine trust
between management and employees
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Convey to the empowered
a true sense of stewardship for the company?s future.
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| Purpose
and Vision |
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An employee told, "You are empowered," may well wonder what he is empowered
to accomplish. Are we empowering employees to create a future or to perform
what they normally perform better? Unfortunately, the latter prevails more
than the former. At the plant level, dedicated, intelligent people try
to do a good job for today. This approach is akin to a survival mode. |
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Seldom do people at the manufacturing level have a purpose. This attitude
occurs because there is no rallying cause for them to embrace and in which
to become involved. They have not received the message in a way that connects
them as individuals to the visionary purpose of the company. |
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In their book Competing for the Future*, Hamel and Prahalad urge
corporations that want to be around in the next millennium to define their
futures in terms of what they want their industries to achieve. Unfortunately,
the task of reinventing companies for the future is very difficult. When
we work at something for some time, we develop thought patters that eventually
become deep-seated values. These mindsets must be overcome. Smaller and
newer companies can exercise more intellectual freedom in designing their
visions because they are not so encumbered by restraining industry and
company mindsets. |
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Mindsets of experience must be overcome and unfrozen by introducing new,
critical thinking into strategic design sessions. Use a provocative facilitator
and currently evolving, group think strategies that show promise in promoting
a free range of thinking in the development of strategic positions. |
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Emerging visions must be truly futuristic. They must use core competencies,
yet seek new functionalities. They must be exciting, based on a societal
good, and not offend the core values of those empowered to achieve them.
They must be simple to visualize from both a business and social standpoint.
They must embrace growth and provide a measure of job security. |
| The
Selection Process |
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Empowerment often sounds like something we do to the people who
work for us. By definition, empowerment means "to authorize someone to
exercise power." Some components of empowerment make empowerment difficult,
or even impossible, to achieve. A corporation cannot let everyone wield
power. Confusion and chaos would result. Limits must be set and power exercised
to achieve a purpose. |
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Empowerment must be defined in company terms. Who will be empowered? For
what purpose? A vision provides the primary purpose, but each department,
group, or team has the component visions that must be achieved. Empowerment
must mean people are free to cross disciplines. |
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To achieve empowerment yet avoid confusion, managers should appoint champions.
Champions should not add bureaucracy to the system, but should act to open
doors for information and settle disputes. |
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Selection criteria should be formulated to ensure people have the proper
characteristics, training, and experience to be empowered. If the process
does not cause discomfort amount executives, it is not culture changing.
It is business as usual and not a prescription for the future. |
| Tap
the Experience |
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Although new thinking is necessary, our core competencies are our experience
pool, the foundation on which the future is built. It is vital to know
your competencies before the future vision is designed. What is done well?
What sets your operation apart from others? Whether the issues are hard
or soft, they must be identified and understood. Empowerment means proper
use and nurturing of needed core competencies. |
| Train
Adequately |
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Without training, the application of empowerment has no consistency or
order. What are the limits of a person?s empowerment? Are they based on
a set of criteria? Will empowerment change as experience and trust increase?
How will it be monitored and measured? These questions need to be answered
and included in the training sessions. |
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People may need to learn new skills, including listening, questioning,
mentoring, and conflict resolution. Companies should engage organizational
development consultants to provide confidential mentoring services to those
empowered. In other words, training should be custom designed. |
| Creating
Trust |
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At a recent conference on trust, few speakers spoke directly to the subject.
They didn?t seem to know what to say about it except that is nice to have.
Yet, empowerment is about transferring power away from owners and executives,
a strong trust issue. |
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Trust is developed by actions that exhibit fairness and communications
that explain deviations. When one person feels the actions of another in
a given situation can be predicted, trust exists. When a team works well
together, members trust and respect each other. How, then, does a company
build trust in this era of rightsizing and downsizing? |
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Developing a vision of purpose and the means to communicate that vision
are steps toward trust. Training people well so they can gain the future
is a step toward trust. Giving people the space and support to be creative
is a step toward trust. But the biggest step is involving them and sharing
the fruits of the accomplishments. |
| Build
Stewardship |
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Stewardship implies all employees will oversee and nurture the assets of
the owners of the company. Stewardship requires a paradigm shift, a change
in traditional thinking about the way work is allocated. Traditionally,
management assigns tasks. Under empowerment, stewards select their own
tasks. This shift requires several prerequisites: |
Outline specific criteria
for selecting stewards
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Define good stewardship
and communicate its rewards
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Make training a prerequisite.
Have a trainer act as a mentor until the trainees develop the required
skills.
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Stewards are asset managers. Undoubtedly, they will exercise their stewardship
in ways that conflict with traditional thinking. Call on your champions
to intervene here to resolve the interpersonal disputes that most assuredly
will occur. Stewards should meet regularly to exchange experiences and
to support one another. |
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Finally, a word needs to be said about benchmarking. Empowering
people to perform daily tasks is not empowerment. It is delegation. Empowerment
and stewardship take on new meaning when associated with a noble and exciting
purpose. That is why vision is so important. Benchmarking defeats this
purpose. Its message is to judge ourselves in terms of others. Benchmarking
against others is not a useful part of creating the future. Comparing
your rate of progress toward your vision against your strategic plan is
worthwhile. |
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Management sincere about power must function on two levels. The familiar
role is to set expectations and the measure needed to achieve a future
of continuing opportunity. The unfamiliar one, to which managers must be
equally committed, is to serve those they have empowered. This role may
be difficult, but if we truly want to transfer power, we must be committed
to the mechanisms that make it work. |
| *Gary Hamel and C.K.
Prahalad, Harvard Business School Press, 1994. The ISBN number of the book
is 0875844162. |
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