Empowering employees is trendy.

No one is writing articles bragging about their strict hierarchy or complex bureaucracy these days.  Podcasters don’t want to interview you to talk about your militaristic command-and-control leadership style.

No, the cool kids are talking about flattening structures and building self-managed teams.

Companies like Morning Star and W.L. Gore & Associates (as in Gore-Tex) have gone so far as to eliminate all management (that’s right, no bosses).  Employees manage themselves and hold each other accountable.

Overall, I’m a big fan of this trend.  It treats employees like human beings, rather than machines, and recognizes that creativity, genius, and leadership are spread throughout an organization and not just clustered at the top.

Creativity, genius, and leadership are not clustered at the top of an organization but spread throughout. Share on X

The trouble with trends, though, is that people jump on board without thinking critically about how or why to adopt them.

The truth is that empowering employees can really cause your organization to come off the rails if you’re not careful.

 

What it means to empower employees

Let’s first clarify – what are we referring to when we talk about empowering employees?  The textbook definition goes like this:

“Empowerment is the process of giving employees and work group members the ability to make decisions about their work, being held accountable for the outcomes of their decisions, accepting responsibility for the outcomes of their decisions, and solving problems on their own”

In other words, the people who do the work get to make decisions on how to do the work.

Empowerment assumes the best of people.  Rather than assuming employees are trying to shirk responsibility and do the bare minimum, an empowerment mindset recognizes that most people want to do well in their job and be seen as a valuable contributor to the company’s success.

Most employees have ideas as to how they could do their job better or how the company could be improved, and they’re waiting for their ideas to be listened to and validated.

Toyota refers to this concept as “chie.”  It is the wisdom of collective experience, and it is why they rely on every employee in their quest for innovation and “continuous improvement.”

 

When you need to limit empowerment

This sounds great, doesn’t it?  I love it.

Yet there is this nagging piece of me that says this approach isn’t always going to work.

According to Chip and Dan Heath, one of the ways that we can learn to make better decisions is to engage in the discipline of challenging our assumptions – to recognize the beliefs that we are unquestioningly accepting and ask, “Is this always the right answer?  What would have to occur in order for the opposite to be true?”

Here is my attempt to answer this question when it comes to empowerment.

With all the potential benefits that come from empowering employees, why might this not always the best idea?

What would have to be true for empowerment to be the wrong approach?

Here are my five scenarios.  See if you agree.

 

1. Employees are new or inexperienced

Letting the new kid on the block make a bunch of decisions could be a disaster.

Before you can empower employees, you need to train, coach, and develop them.  Not only do they need the skills to do the job well, but you also want them to understand the culture of the organization and embrace “the way it’s done around here.”

If you empower employees with decision-making authority too early, you set them up for unnecessary failure.  Allowing them to fail and letting them learn from the experience is fantastic, but first let them learn from the failures of others who have gone before them.  There is no point in repeating the same mistakes endlessly as an organization.

Not only can empowering employees too early lead to needless mistakes, but it can also increase your risk of unethical behaviour.  Not because new employees somehow have a sketchier moral compass, but because ethical behaviour in a particular industry is often complex and can take years to understand properly.  Confidentiality guidelines, for instance, can vary widely from one industry to the next.  Even the more serious offense of bribery is seen very differently across international cultures.

Empowerment does not need to be an all-or-nothing affair, though.  In this case, start small and slowly ramp up as your employees gain experience.

 

2. Vision and values are unclear

How can you step back and trust your team to make the same types of decisions on their own as they would if you were in the room?

This level of trust is at the heart of empowerment – it won’t work without it.

Two of the most valuable tools you have to create this environment of trust are vision and values.

Vision gives your team their north star, their shared picture of a preferred future.

Values provide the railings to ensure that no one wanders off too far to the left or the right in pursuing this vision.

Not only do we all want to be heading in the same direction, but we want to be heading in the same direction in the same way.

If you value collaboration and alignment, for example, it’s not good enough that your employee is pursuing the shared vision if they’re doing it as a Lone Ranger and never communicating with their teammates.

If you don’t have a strong culture, rooted in a shared vision with shared values, empowered employees will make decisions based on their vision and their values.  This is a quick path to chaos.

The more in-line your employees are with your organizational culture, the more reliably you can pass authority on to them.

 

3. There really is one right way of doing things

Sometimes, after years of accumulated experience and research, you know there is one best way of doing the work.  If this is the case, empowering your team to suddenly get creative might not be the best idea.

Plenty of businesses have become successful precisely because they don’t allow any variance in the way that the work is to be done.  A franchise restaurant, for example, has every step meticulously recorded in an operations manual so that the customer experience will be the same regardless of where they are in the world.  Too much empowerment would actually detract from the culture of familiarity and predictability that they’re trying to create.

In a tightly controlled environment like this, empowering employees may have to show up in different ways.  Transparency in leadership, asking for feedback, and allowing everyone to be heard are all ways to empower your team even if you have very little wiggle room in how the work needs to be done.

 

4. You’re not providing what they need

Empowerment is not abdication.

Giving away responsibilities to employees and then being super hands-off is not called empowerment; that’s called poor leadership.

As a manager, you need to learn to delegate while also staying engaged.

In order to be effectively empowered, your employees require at least these three things from you:

Information.  Employees need access to people and data in order to make intelligent decisions.  If all the necessary info is reserved for manager’s eyes only, empowerment will only result in poor decision making.  Open-book management, where the company’s financial performance numbers are opened up for employees, is one approach to this that has been effective in many settings.

Support.  Asking employees to be involved in more decisions increases the amount of responsibility and risk associated with their job.  While some will be motivated by this, others won’t be thrilled – it just seems like more work.  As empowerment goes up, so should the amount of support provided by management.  The increase in authority should also come with an increase in training, coaching, and developing so that they’re set up for success.

Resources.  There is nothing quite like being given authority for something without also being given the tools to do the job right.  This is demoralizing.  I know resources are often tight in an organization, but as much as possible, give your team what they need to succeed.  This could be funds, staffing, equipment, or maybe just a case of Red Bulls.

If you can’t, or aren’t willing to, provide these things for your team, empowerment will only lead to frustrated and overworked employees.

If you want your employees to act like owners, you need to treat them like owners. That means they’re not your workers, they’re your partners.

If you want your employees to act like owners, you need to treat them like owners. That means they're not your workers, they're your partners. Share on X

5. You’re a perfectionist or a control freak

If you’re the type of manager that comes down hard on mistakes or is overly critical of others’ ideas, being allowed to make decisions could be a terrifying experience for your employees.

People have to be allowed to make mistakes.  There has to be safety and permission for your employees to fail, learn, and try again.

When you let others start making decisions, some of those decisions won’t work out, and how you respond to that as a manager has huge implications for your culture.

One of the values you’ll need to embrace is that of perpetual learning.

It’s never a complete failure if you’ve learned something.

Empowerment requires managers to give employees space to explore, learn, and experiment.  It means letting other people birth new ideas and giving them the time and resources needed to develop them.

This requires a particular style of leadership.  If you have been trained in, and are comfortable with, a top-down, hierarchical authority structure, empowerment will feel very counterintuitive for you.

 

What’s your take?

Empowering employees has loads of benefits – better decisions, increased innovation, greater alignment, faster response times, increased employee ownership and job satisfaction, and even decreased stress levels – but it requires the right conditions in order to realize these positive effects.

I’ve listed five scenarios that could sabotage your efforts at empowerment, but this is certainly not comprehensive.

What would you add to the list?  Are there other situations in which empowerment is unlikely to work well? 

Leave a comment or share on social media.  Let’s keep the conversation going.

Thanks for being here,

Dan