When your people are free to lead initiatives and make decisions on their own they are more engaged, more innovative and productive. But here’s the problem. Delivering real empowerment is fraught with challenges.
Organisations claim to want to empower their employees but can they really? The utopia of empowerment is often lost in the reality of day to day organisational life. By unraveling where organisations often go wrong, we’ll remove the blocks to getting it right.
We’ve written this to help you create an empowerment culture more likely to help your people achieve their full potential, with the results to match.
Empowerment challenges and solutions:
There’s no empowerment without accountability
Challenge: When people are empowered to do something, they should also be accountable for it. But often organisations find that people are less keen on being held accountable. The two go together. Without accountability people are just giving opinions without taking ownership of the change. Accountability brings focus.
Solution: People become more empowered when they are clear about their goals and objectives. This means making sure that project goals and anticipated outcomes are well defined. As such, one of the best ways to empower people is to set clear boundaries of accountability and then empower people to deliver those. This clarity gives them the confidence to take ownership of a given situation as they’ll know it’s in their remit.
Fear of failure and lack of trust
Challenge: Failure is often perceived as a negative and lack of trust dampens empowerment. This makes it an inhibitor to employees taking what might be considered a more risky course of action. They may also feel less willing to empower others for fear of the responsibility this carries. Gradually, fear of failure can make an organisation risk averse.
Solution: Trust your people to make the decisions you’ve empowered them to take. And if and when they do fail, make learning through failure a positive part of your culture. Leaders who embrace their mistakes and share how they fix them can help people more willingly take risks and accept accountability for their decisions. When individuals learn from failure, they become more resilient and better equipped to handle future scenarios.
As we covered in our recent blog, we think organisations will benefit from making friends with failure.
Absence of empowerment skills
Challenge: Stepping up to take big decisions can be scary. Not everyone comes equipped with the skills they need. Even where empowerment is strongly supported in a culture, it doesn’t mean everyone feels comfortable taking the lead. How do you help someone to feel confident enough to feel empowered?
Solution: By investing in coaching skills. Organisations who train their leaders and managers have a clear competitive advantage as studies consistently find that those trained in coaching skills increase employee empowerment, sustainable performance and health and wellbeing. What’s more, learning a new skill that develops hidden strengths can be a highly empowering experience.
Delegation chaos
Challenge: Empowerment is often confused with delegation. With good intentions to empower people, leaders can over delegate what they should be responsible for. They also risk being unable to account for what they are really accountable for. What’s more, those on the receiving end of delegation chaos can’t feel empowered if they also feel overwhelmed.
Solution: Delegate according to interests, capabilities and workload. Work that is focused on strengths and aligned with current responsibilities and with personal development benefits is far more likely to be met with focus and actually get done. Putting some thought into managing delegation can also help to mitigate the risk of burnout.
Increased risk of burnout
Challenge: Overload people and they will burnout. The burden of too much responsibility is real. Research shows that people thrive best with medium, not high, levels of empowerment. People experiencing burnout are often in denial of the problem or may feel under pressure to continue even if they are. As a result they may continue to accept responsibility but may not have the energy to deliver.
Solution: The skill for leaders is working out the level of empowerment that stretches people enough without overloading them. It’s also beneficial to help managers be more aware of the signs of burnout and de-stigmatise mental health as a workplace issue. In a similar vein to managing delegation, burnout also comes from over-stepping boundaries. The more people feel empowered to protect their boundaries and deflect intrusions that impact time and privacy, the more confident and empowered they’ll feel when it comes to making the right decisions for the organisation.
If you are feeling affected by burnout, you may find help from this Monkey Puzzle video with tips for burnout prevention.
Conclusion
The reality is that there is always a frame around empowerment, even CEOs we work with are working within the constraints of the market, shareholders or parent companies. However, the benefits of an empowerment culture are worth managing through the challenges. You’ll create an organisation that is stronger and more resilient for the employee engagement, increased innovation and more sustainable growth it brings.
