Empowerment is a catchy word these days. A quick search for ‘employee empowerment’ on the Harvard Business Review site returned over 1500 entries. But what is empowerment?
Empowerment is pushing decision-making to where the information is. In L. David Marquet’s book, Turn the Ship Around, he uses the term “control” in place of empowerment and puts it this way:
“’Don’t move information to authority, move authority to the information.’”
L. David Marquet, Turn the Ship Around
This means if you are close to the information, you make the decision. It means that you don’t need to send the information “up the chain” in order for the decision to be made by someone else. It makes for a more efficient organization because you save the round trip time of pushing the information up, having someone else consume and understand it, and then pushing the decision back down, which then needs to be consumed and understood. Empowered people making decisions are more likely to fully support the decision as well.
“People support what they create.”
Brendon Burchard
The opposite of empowerment is micromanagement. As a leader, if you want total control, if you don’t trust your team, then you need to know everything. This makes for an inefficient team because of the time the round trip takes of pushing information to authority and then pushing the decision to where the information was in the first place. However, there is a place for Level 1, “Tell me what to do” leadership. If a team member is new to the context or hasn’t yet achieved competence in the specific area, they may need more guidance than others. To have a highly effective team, the leader should help to facilitate filling any competency and clarity gaps, so they can move the team member up the Ladder of Leadership as soon as practical.
Pushing authority to where the information is doesn’t mean that a leader higher in the hierarchy doesn’t get informed. At Level 5, “I intend”, the leader is informed, even if they are not making the ultimate decision.
Two pillars support empowerment
According to Marquet, there are two pillars that support empowerment: clarity and competence. In order to give control and empower a team, a leader needs to be clear in the vision and goals, and the team member needs to have technical competence. Makes sense, doesn’t it? If we don’t know where we’re going and we don’t know how to get it done, we shouldn’t be empowered to make decisions! But if we are clear on the vision and goals, and we have the technical competence, then control can be given to the people who have the information.
I also add “contextual competence” in with technical competence. Often when a person joins a team they have technical competence in the technical area that is needed, but not the needed context. For example, an electrical engineer may join a team and knows how to design circuit boards, but without knowing the context of where the circuit board is going to be used, they should not have authority on final decisions. As leaders we should work to fill any context gaps that our team members have, so they can make the best decisions.
Courage to empower
Empowering team members takes courage on behalf of the leader. If the leader comes from a model of making all the decisions, moving to a model of empowerment may be a bit unnerving – at first. Once the leader gets some wins and sees how efficient empowering the team is, then they may understand the power in moving authority to where the information is. When the leader is freed up from making every single decision, they can work on some Quadrant II items like strategy, coaching, or envisioning a new future.
Experiment
When I was a project leader I came across this definition of empowerment, and I wondered how I could give more control to my team. Our software team was comprised of developers and a couple of testers. When an issue came in, it was addressed by a developer and handed off to the test team for testing. I would parcel out the test tasks. I tried to level out the work, but I didn’t take much else into account. To experiment with empowerment, we put in place a system where instead of me deciding who tested what, the resolved issues would go into a pool and the testers could choose the items they wanted to test. I made sure the goals and priorities were clear, and then gave the testers control of testing.
I couldn’t believe what a success this was! Turns out I was giving issues to the testers to test in areas of the product they weren’t 100% familiar with, and this was causing stress. Once the system allowed them to choose, two things happened. The first was that the testers decided between them who would work on what so that everything was tested. I found out they weren’t communicating before this system was in place! Now, both of them knew exactly what the other was working on, which was helpful if for some reason someone had to pick up the work of the other. The second thing that happened was that they started coming to me with suggestions on how to improve our processes and product. Wow! That was great! I’m so glad I gave control to the test team. It made us more efficient, and the team members owned the testing more than they had under the previous system.
tl;dr
Empowering people who have the information with the authority to make decisions requires organizational clarity around vision and goals, and requires the team member to be technically competent and to understand the context. Pushing decision-making to where the information is results in a more efficient and effective organization because the time to make a decision is reduced.
engineer your life
- Identify any gaps in clarity of vision and goals and technical competence that you may have in your current role. How can you work to narrow these gaps?
- If you are a leader, do your team members have any gaps in clarity or competence? How can you help narrow those gaps?
- Watch David Marquet’s video “What is Leadership?”
- Watch two short ‘nudges’ on empowerment: Push Authority to Information 1, Push Authority to Information 2
Photo by Tomas Jasovsky on Unsplash