Harvesting the creative and emotional power of all your people.

"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." – Elber Hubbard

Balance between authority and employee empowerment

Effective leadership demands a delicate balance between laissez-faire and overly controlling styles. "Tilting too far toward a majority vote democracy, the manager becomes reluctant to exercise sufficient force necessary to propel the company toward its goals," says Harvard Business School professor Michael Beer. "This creates an organizational bereft of leadership. In such an environment, management fails to coordinates the various components of the enterprise and, in turn, fails to harness the positive factors inherent in the conflict between operating units (such as credit versus sales or technology versus human resources). Ironically, what appears to authorize an exceptional level of personal freedom and flexibility turns out to be a trap. Call it the paradox of empowerment."

Energizing employees

What energizes people is the broader horizon, the excitement of new challenges and big opportunities. When their leaders offer this excitement, people come alive.

The one-on-one relationships that individual workers have with their managers, and the trust, respect, and consideration that their managers show toward them on a daily basis are also at the core of an energized workforce. Getting the best out of workers is above all a product of the "softer" side of management - how individuals are treated, inspired, and challenged to do their best work - and the support, resources, and guidance that is provided by managers to help make exceptional employee performance a reality.

People power

People as your most important asset. Your technologies, products and structures can be copied by competitors. No one, however, can match your highly charged, motivated people who care. People are your firm's repository of knowledge and they are central to your company's competitive advantage. Well educated, coached, and highly motivated people are critical to the development and execution of strategies, especially in today's faster-paced, more perplexing world, where top management alone can no longer assure your firm's competitiveness.

Why employee empowerment?

People are your firm's most underutilized resource. In the new knowledge economy, independent entrepreneurship and initiative is needed throughout the ranks of your organization. Involvement in an organization is no longer a one-way street. In today's corporate environment a manager must work towards engaging organization forcefully enough to achieve its objectives. New knowledge-based enterprises are characterized by flat hierarchical structures and multi-skilled workforce. Managers assume more leadership and coaching tasks and work hard to provide employees with resources and working conditions they need to accomplish the goals they've agreed to. In brief, managers work for their staff, and not the reverse.

Empowerment is the oil that lubricates the exercise of learning. Talented and empowered human capital is becoming the prime ingredient of organizational success. A critical feature of successful teams, especially in knowledge-based enterprises, is that they are invested with a significant degree of empowerment, or decision-making authority.

Equally important, employee empowerment changes the managers' mind-set and leaves them with more time to engage in broad-based thinking, visioning, nurturing, and working on the business. This intelligent and productive division of duties between visionary leaders, focusing on emerging opportunities, and empowered employees, running the business unit day to day (with oversight on the leader's part) provides for a well-managed enterprise with strong growth potential.

Developing entrepreneurial staff

There are two phases in developing an entrepreneurial workplace. Phase I creates the environment necessary to support and encourage it. Phase II is building your staff's entrepreneurial skills.

Liberate your employees from the fear of trying new things

Failure provides a great learning opportunity and should be viewed as a very lifeblood of success. "If you give people freedom to innovate, the freedom to experiment, the freedom to succeed, then you must also give them the freedom to fail.

Empowerment through coaching

The new breed of leaders recognizes that in today's complex business environment autocracy no longer works, yet the empowerment alone is not enough. Coaching aims to enhance the learning ability and performance of others. It involves providing feedback, but also uses other techniques such as motivation, effective questioning and consciously matching your management style to the coachee's readiness to undertake a particular task. It is based on helping the coachee to help her/himself through interacting dynamically with her/him - it does not rely on a one-way flow of telling and instructing.

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Caring is the key to empowerment

One of the most important traits of all motivators at work is consideration. Employees report that the best managers they ever had were people who cared about them as people and as friends. These managers took the time to ask them questions about their lives, and to listen patiently while they talked about the dilemmas and problems and situations in their families. The more that the employees felt that the boss liked them and respected them, the more empowered and motivated they felt.

Participatory management

Cross-level work groups can contribute a lot to corporate decision-making and planning. Participatory management means seeking employee's opinions and actions whenever possible and keeping an open mind to the suggestions and criticism they offer. Participatory management offers the following benefits:

It is a powerful motivator – you own what you do and where you work.
Better decisions result – a synergy effect from collecting more inputs.
A trusting climate is created – it is important for all employees to know not what is being done but why.
Employees understand their jobs better – as they understand better how they fit into achieving the overall corporate goals.
Progress towards corporate goals is accelerated – through frequent discussions about how the work is progressing.

Employee ownership of quality and productivity

Quality and productivity is not something that management can mandate or dictate. To gain employee commitment to the quality process, your company's management, control, and reward systems must be modified to give employees greater responsibility and opportunity to become quality and customer oriented and motivate them to strive for continuous improvement. Give ownership for quality to your employees, elicit and listen to their ideas about improvement and empower them to make more decisions and perform tasks that are quality related.

Building and nurturing customer relationships

Creating a work environment that encourages rapid response to customers' needs and attentive follow-through is the key to leveraging the power of the service-profit chain. This is only possible when people are empowered to make decisions and are motivated to solve problems. By encouraging employees to go beyond the literal boundaries of their jobs - to make suggestions for improvement - you gain not just a part, but the full potential of their contributions to the business.

Employee empowerment: Hewlett-Packard way

To manage dualities and create a delicate balance between teamwork and individual creativity, HP founders developed the concept that is known as the Hewlett-Packard Way. Company leaders set the corporate objectives in the framework of the HP value system and get everyone to agree on these objectives and to understand what the company is trying to do. Then they turn everybody loose so that they could move along in a common direction.

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Lessons from Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart

Communicate everything you possibly can to your partners. The more they know, the more they'll understand. The more they understand, the more they'll care. Once they care, there's no stopping them. If you don't trust your associates to know what's going on, they'll know you really don't consider them partners. Information is power, and the gain you get from empowering your associates more than offsets the risk of informing your competitors.

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Topics related to "Employee empowerment"

Employee empowerment

A successful corporation must be able to craft a new partnership-based relationship with its employees – it must be able to live the ideals of people power, rather than merely talk about them.