I was facilitating a group of key managers recently, and we began discussing effective empowerment and how it would look.
When I opened up for questions, a recently-promoted manager asked, “What if an employee doesn’t want to be empowered–what if all they want is to continue status-quo in their current role?”
This is a great question, that many of us have been faced with at one time or another. Some people want their lives to remain constant; to not change or evolve hardly at all. Others fear failure so greatly they insist they want no additional responsibility whatsoever, thereby reducing the likelihood that they’ll be removed from their comfort zone.
Sometimes, it takes more than a manager offering responsibility to get an employee engaged with the idea.
To this I have two comments: First, these employees will just need to “get over it.” Life doesn’t stand still, and our businesses clearly do not either. We must constantly morph our business into something new, adaptive, and different, sometimes merely to maintain our organizational status quo.
Further, employees unwilling to grow can jam up a development pipeline, taking a seat that could be filled by someone willing to invest the discretionary effort to help the organization succeed.
Next, just as importantly, we must make sure that our employees really know what we are asking of them.
For instance, to be successfully empowered, our employees need:
- An understandable definition of empowerment (to you), what that means to them, and what exact accountabilities, responsibilities, and activities you mean to delegate.
- Sufficient and appropriate information to make the decisions we are hoping to delegate. Realize that, especially in the early stages of empowerment, these employees do not have the benefit of our knowledge; many of the decisions we make in a 5-minute flurry would seem difficult and complex to someone unaccustomed to the effort.
- Input into the total decision-making process. Note, I said “input.” Sometimes you’ll move forward with their ideas and suggestions, other times not. The key to making this work is to continue to ask for and expect that input.
- Skill development. It’s unreasonable to expect someone to handle new responsibilities, especially those of a higher order – that you might likely delegate – without some attempt at providing them with the necessary new skills and knowledge.You may not have to send them back for an MBA, but simply saying “handle this” probably isn’t enough.
- Your support and consistency. Empowerment is, at its core, really effective delegation. You must be willing to live with processes, attempts, approaches, and even mistakes… without reversing course. The first time you “crawfish” is the last time someone sticks their neck out in effort.
That doesn’t mean you let someone give away the store. Zig Ziglar always said to “in-spect what you ex-pect,” and there’s a ton of truth in that. Final accountability still rests on your shoulders, and there may come a time where you must unilaterally reverse a catastrophically poor decision. Just don’t do so randomly.
Empowerment—really effective delegation–results in better overall decisions, quicker actions, and frees up some of your time for more strategic efforts. When done correctly, it’s clearly a win for all. Employees get developed, decisions get made, and tasks get accomplished.
Do it right, and it’s a home run all around.
