Employee Empowerment: How to Empower Employees

Employee empowerment is a strategy and philosophy that enables employees to make decisions about their jobs. Employee empowerment helps employees own their work and take responsibility for their results. Employee empowerment helps employees serve customers at the level of the organization where the customer interface exists.

Employee Empowerment: How to Empower Employees

Employee empowerment is a strategy and philosophy that enables employees to make decisions about their jobs. Employee empowerment helps employees own their work and take responsibility for their results. Employee empowerment helps employees serve customers at the level of the organization where the customer interface exists.

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Employee Empowerment
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Definition and Examples

Definition: Employee Empowerment

Empowerment is the process of enabling or authorizing an individual to think, behave, take action, and control work and decision making in autonomous ways. It is the state of feeling self-empowered to take control of one's own destiny. When thinking about empowerment in human relations terms, try to avoid thinking of it as something that one individual does for another. This is one of the problems organizations have experienced with the concept of empowerment. People think that "someone," usually the manager, has to bestow empowerment on the people who report to him. Consequently, the reporting staff members "wait" for the bestowing of empowerment, and the manager asks why people won't act in empowered ways. This led to a general unhappiness, mostly undeserved, with the concept of empowerment in many organizations. Think of empowerment, instead, as the process of an individual enabling himself to take action and control work and decision making in autonomous ways.

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Examples
The manager of the Human Resources department added weeks to the process of hiring new employees by requiring his supposedly "empowered" staff members to obtain his signature on every document related to the hiring of a new employee. John empowered himself to discuss the career objectives he wished to pursue with his supervisor. He told his supervisor, frankly, that if the opportunities were not available in his current company, he would move on to another company.

Top 10 Principles of Employee Empowerment

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The Credo of an Empowering Manager

Looking for real management advice about people? Your goal is to create a work environment in which people are empowered, productive, contributing, and happy. Don't hobble them by limiting their tools or information. Trust them to do the right thing. Get out of their way and watch them catch fire. These are the ten most important principles for managing people in a way that reinforces employee empowerment, accomplishment, and contribution. These management actions enable both the people who work with you and the people who report to you to soar.

1. Demonstrate You Value People

Your regard for people shines through in all of your actions and words. Your facial expression, your body language, and your words express what you are thinking about the people who report to you. Your goal is to demonstrate your appreciation for each person's unique value. No matter how an employee is performing on their current task, your value for the employee as a human being should never falter and always be visible. More about communication and value:

Listen With Your Eyes: Tips for Understanding Nonverbal Communication Interpersonal Communication Dynamics You Can Make Their Day: Ten Tips for the Leader

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2. Share Leadership Vision

Help people feel that they are part of something bigger than themselves and their individual job. Do this by making sure they know and have access to the organization's overall mission, vision, and strategic plans. More about vision:

Build a Strategic Framework: Mission Statement, Vision, Values ... Leadership Vision

3. Share Goals and Direction

Share the most important goals and direction for your group. Where possible, either make progress on goals measurable and observable, or ascertain that you have shared your picture of a positive outcome with the people responsible for accomplishing the results. More about goals and direction:

Beyond Traditional Smart Goals The Darker Side of Goal Setting: Why Goal Setting Fails ...

4. Trust People
Trust the intentions of people to do the right thing, make the right decision, and make choices that, while maybe not exactly what you would decide, still work. More about trust:

Trust Rules: The Most Important Secret About Trust Inspirational Quotes: Trust and Trustworthiness

5. Provide Information for Decision Making

Make certain that you have given people, or made sure that they have access to, all of the information they need to make thoughtful decisions. More about decision making:

Preventing Predictable Decision Making Errors How to Involve Employees in Decision Making

6. Delegate Authority and Impact Opportunities, Not Just More Work

Don't just delegate the drudge work; delegate some of the fun stuff, too. You know, delegate the important meetings, the committee memberships that influence product development and decision making, and the projects that people and customers notice. The employee will grow and develop new skills. Your plate will be less full so you can concentrate on contribution. Your reporting staff will gratefully shine - and so will you. More about delegation:

How and When to Empower People Tips for Effective Delegation Why Employees Don't Do What You Want Them to Do Play Well With Others: Develop Effective Work Relationships

7. Provide Frequent Feedback

Provide frequent feedback so that people know how they are doing. Sometimes, the purpose of feedback is reward and recognition. People deserve your constructive feedback, too, so they can continue to develop their knowledge and skills. More about feedback:

How To Provide Feedback That Has an Impact Performance Management: You Get What You Request and Reward Coaching for Improved Performance

8. Solve Problems: Don't Pinpoint Problem People

When a problem occurs, ask what is wrong with the work system that caused the people to fail, not what is wrong with the people. Worst case response to problems? Seek to identify and punish the guilty. (Thank you, Dr. Deming.)

More about problem solving:

Why Employees Don't Do What You Want Them to Do Fight for What's Right: Ten Tips to Encourage Meaningful Conflict

9. Listen to Learn and Ask Questions to Provide Guidance

Provide a space in which people will communicate by listening to them and asking them questions. Guide by asking questions, not by telling grown up people what to do. People generally know the right answers if they have the opportunity to produce them. When an employee brings you a problem to solve, ask, "what do you think you should do to solve this problem?" Or, ask, "what action steps do you recommend?" Employees can demonstrate what they know and grow in the process. More about listening and asking questions:

Communication Success Tips: Listen to Understand Communication Success Tips: Listen With Full Attention

10. Help Employees Feel Rewarded and Recognized for Empowered Behavior
When employees feel under-compensated, under-titled for the responsibilities they take on, under-noticed, under-praised, and under-appreciated, dont expect results from employee empowerment. The basic needs of employees must feel met for employees to give you their discretionary energy, that extra effort that people voluntarily invest in work. More about

Top Ten Ways to Make Employee Empowerment Fail

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Five Reasons Employee Empowerment Fails

Empowerment is a panacea for many organization ills when empowerment is implemented with care. People in organizations say they want empowerment and often, they mean it. Managers say they want empowered employees and often, they mean it, too. Organizations that are committed to the ongoing growth of their employees, recognize empowerment as one of their most important strategic methods to motivate employees. Empowerment is also a key strategy to enable people who have the need, the answers, and the knowledge, make decisions about how to best serve customers. If empowerment is such a great tool and strategy for accomplishing work, customer service, and employee motivation, how come empowerment is so rarely implemented effectively? Here are my top ten reasons why empowerment fails.

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Why Employee Empowerment Fails

Managers pay lip service to empowerment, but do not really believe in its power. As with all management and business buzz words, employee empowerment can seem like a good thing to do. After all, well-respected management books recommend that you empower employees. When you empower employees, they grow their skills and your organization benefits from their empowerment. Right. Employees know when you are serious about empowerment and when you understand and walk your talk. Half-hearted or unbelievable empowerment efforts will fail. Managers dont really understand what empowerment means. They have a vague notion that employee empowerment means you start a few teams that address workplace employee morale or safety. You ask people what they think about something at a meeting. Wrong. Employee empowerment is a philosophy or strategy that enables people to make decisions about their job. Managers fail to establish boundaries for empowerment. In your absence, what decisions can be made by staff members? What decisions can employees make day-by-day that they do not need to have permission or oversight to make? These boundaries must be defined or employee empowerment efforts fail. Managers have defined the decision making authority and boundaries with staff, but then micromanage the work of employees. This is usually because managers dont trust staff to make good decisions. Staff members know this and either craftily make decisions on their own and hide their results or they come to you for everything because they dont know what they really can control. One HR manager added ten days to the company hiring process because he required his signature at certain milestones in the process. The paperwork was buried on his desk for days, but staff did not proceed without his signature. His lack of trust made empowerment a joke. Do employees make mistakes? Certainly, but fooling them about their boundaries is worse. Second guess the decisions of employees you have given the authority to make a decision. You can help staff make good decisions by coaching training, and providing necessary information. You can even model good decision making, But, what you cannot do, unless a serious complication will result, is undermine or change the decision you had empowered a staff person to make. Teach the employee to make a better decision next time. But dont undermine their faith in their personal competence and in your trust, support, and approbation. You discourage empowerment for the future. Take a look at the second five reasons

Team Building and Delegation

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How and When to Empower People

Employee involvement is creating an environment in which people have an impact on decisions and actions that affect their jobs. Employee involvement is not the goal nor is it a tool, as practiced in many organizations. Rather, it is a management and leadership philosophy about how people are most enabled to contribute to continuous improvement and the ongoing success of their work organization.

My bias, from working with people for 35+ years, is to involve people as much as possible in all aspects of work decisions and planning. This involvement increases ownership and commitment, retains your best employees, and fosters an environment in which people choose to be motivated and contributing. It is also important for team building. How to involve employees in decisionmaking and continuous improvement activities is the strategic aspect of involvement and can include such methods as suggestion systems, manufacturing cells, work teams, continuous improvement meetings, Kaizen (continuous improvement) events, corrective action processes and periodic discussions with the supervisor. Intrinsic to most employee involvement processes is training in team effectiveness, communication, and problem solving; the development of reward and recognition systems; and frequently, the sharing of gains made through employee involvement efforts.

Employee Involvement Model

For people and organizations that desire a model to apply, the best I have discovered was developed from work by Tannenbaum and Schmidt (1958) and Sadler (1970).

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Tell: the supervisor makes the decision and announces it to staff. The supervisor provides complete direction. Tell is useful when communicating about safety issues, government regulations and for decisions that neither require nor ask for employee input. Sell: the supervisor makes the decision and then attempts to gain commitment from staff by "selling" the positive aspects of the decision. Sell is useful when employee commitment is needed, but the decision is not open to employee influence. Consult: the supervisor invites input into a decision while retaining authority to make the final decision herself. The key to a successful consultation is to inform employees, on the front end of the discussion, that their input is needed, but that the supervisor is retaining the authority to make the final decision. This is the level of involvement that can create employee dissatisfaction most readily when this is not clear to the people providing input. Join: the supervisor invites employees to make the decision with the supervisor. The supervisor considers his voice equal in the decision process. The key to a successful join is when the supervisor truly builds consensus around a decision and is willing to keep her influence equal to that of the others providing input.

Adding to the Model

To round out the model, I add the following:

Delegate: the supervisor turns the decision over to another party. The key to successful delegation is to always build a feedback loop and a timeline into the process. The supervisor must also share any "preconceived picture" he has of the anticipated outcome of the process.

Reference: Tannenbaum, R. and Schmidt, W. How to Choose a Leadership Pattern. Harvard Business Review, 1958, 36, 95-101. This article is an excerpt from the Michigan State University M.E.N.T.O.R.S. Manual: Monthly Conversation Guide #9. Copyright Susan M. Heathfield and Michigan State University, 2003-2004.

Suggested Reading
How to Build a Teamwork Culture: Do the Hard StuffTwelve Tips for Team BuildingEmployee Involvement

nspirational Quotes for Business: Empowerment and Delegation

From Susan M. Heathfield, Your Guide to Human Resources. FREE Newsletter. Sign Up Now!

Empowerment and Delegation

Looking for an inspirational quote or a business quotation about empowerment for your newsletter, business presentation, bulletin board or inspirational posters? These empowerment and delegation quotes are useful to help motivation and inspiration. These quotes about empowerment and delegation will help you create success in business, success in management and success in life.

Quotations About Empowerment and Delegation

NEW: "Today many American corporations spend a great deal of money and time trying to increase the originality of their employees, hoping thereby to get a competitive edge in the marketplace. But such programs make no difference unless management also learns to recognize the valuable ideas among the many novel ones, and then finds ways of implementing them." --Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi "The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and selfrestraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it." --Theodore Roosevelt "The great leaders are like the best conductors - they reach beyond the notes to reach the magic in the players." --Blaine Lee "If there is any one axiom that I have tried to live up to in trying to become successful in business, it is the fact that I have tried to surround myself with associates that know more about business than I do.

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management, their customer feedback, their planning cycles can be quite different than they ever were before." --Bill Gates "Not many of us will be leaders; and even those who are leaders must also be followers much of the time. This is the crucial role. Followers judge leaders. Only if the leaders pass that test do they have any impact. The potential followers, if their judgment is poor, have judged themselves. If the leader takes his or her followers to the goal, to great achievements, it is because the followers were capable of that kind of response." --Garry Wills in Certain Trumpets: The Nature of Leadership "Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself." --Gloria Steinem "Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity." --General George Smith Patton, Jr. "An empowered organization is one in which individuals have the knowledge, skill, desire, and opportunity to personally succeed in a way that leads to collective organizational success." --Stephen Covey

what is e empowerment?
Employee empowerment is a term used to express the ways in which non-managerial staff can make autonomous decisions without consulting a boss/manager. These self-willed decisions can be small or large depending upon the degree of power with which the company wishes to invest employees. Employee empowerment can begin with training and converting a whole company to an empowerment model. Conversely it may merely mean giving employees the ability to make some decisions on their own. There are employee empowerment workshops, books and articles. There is even a magazine called Empowerment that can help a company converting to employee driven decision-making. The thinking behind employee empowerment is that it gives power to the individual and thus makes for happier employees. By offering employees choice and participation on a more responsible level, the employees are more invested in their company, and view themselves as a representative of such. For employee empowerment to work successfully, the management team must be truly committed to allowing employees to make decisions. They may wish to define the scope of decisions made. Building decision-making teams is often one of the models used in employee empowerment, because it allows for managers and workers to contribute ideas toward directing the company. Autocratic managers, who are micromanagers, tend not to be able to utilize employee empowerment. These types of managers tend to oversee all aspects of others work, and usually will not give up control. A manager dedicated to employee empowerment must be willing to give up control of some aspects of work production. When employees feel as though they have choice and can make direct decisions, this does often lead to a greater feeling of self-worth. In a model where power is closely tied to sense of self, having some power is a valuable thing. An employee who does not feel constantly watched and criticized is more likely to consider work as a positive environment, rather than a negative one. One easy way to begin employee empowerment in the workplace is to install a suggestion box, where workers can make suggestions without fear of punishment or retribution. However, simply placing a suggestion box somewhere is only the first step. Managers must then be willing to read and consider suggestions. They might provide a forum where questions or suggestions receive a response, like a weekly or monthly newsletter. In addition, managers can hold a once monthly meeting open to employees where all suggestions are addressed.

At least some suggestions have to be approved in order for employees to feel that they are having some impact on their company. Failure to approve or implement any suggestions reinforces that all the power belongs to the managers and not the workers. Employee empowerment of any form can only work when managers are willing to be open to new ideas and strategies. If no such willingness exists, employee empowerment is likely to be non-existent.