Why do we need empowerment?
What must leaders overcome mentally and emotionally to give up control yet retain full responsibility? Do you give employees specific goals as well as the freedom to meet them in any way they choose? Or do people really just want to do as they are told?
Leader-follower
In a leader-follower structure followers take orders and do what they are told to do. They rely on the leader to make all decisions.
They have limited decision making authority and little incentive to give the utmost of their intellect, energy and passion.
You must release them instead. Recognize their inherent genius and creativity, and allow those talents to emerge. Let them make meaningful decisions.
Are you as leader willing to be vulnerable to the effects of their decisions?
Turn disempowered phrases like
- "I would like to",
- "Could we",
- "What should I do about"
... into empowered phrases like
- "We intend to",
- "We plan on",
- "We will".
Ask people to state their intentions. Let them make meaningful decisions. Turn passive followers into active leaders.
Rather than giving specific lists of tasks, give broad guidance and context and tell them to prepare the tasks instead. Don't tell people to do stuff they already know they have to do.
Resist the urge to provide solutions.
When the performance of a unit goes down after leaders leave, it is taken as a sign that they were good leaders, not that they were ineffective in training their people properly.
What comes first, mindset or behavior?
Instead of trying to change mindsets and then change the way you act, start acting differently and the new thinking will follow. You can choose to change your own thinking and hope this leads to new behavior, or change your behavior and hope this leads to new thinking.
Empowerment does not work without competence and clarity. The new decision makers must have a higher level of technical knowledge and clearer sense of organizational purpose than ever before. This is leadership.
When you explain a change, people hear and think they know what you mean, but they don't. They have never had a picture of what you are talking about. They can't see in their imagination how it works. Think out loud. Be honest about what you intend to achieve and communicate that all the time, at every level.
That's how you turn a ship around.