Creating a Culture of Empowerment to Get
Astonishing Results

by Dr. Alan Randolph - Speaker, Trainer, Author, Consultant

 Far too many companies are trying to slice, reorganize, and cost-cut themselves to enhanced performance. Most of these efforts lead to short-term gains at best. The only hope for sustained growth and improved performance is to create a culture that taps into the power of people—a culture of “Empowerment.”

While sometimes maligned over the years, empowerment is a legitimate way to deal with the challenges facing organizations today—global competition, rapidly changing technologies, demanding customers, and pressures to continually improve performance. But the long journey to empowerment is full of challenges and paradoxes, and is often misunderstood. Both managers and employees have had little experience with empowered organizations compared to hierarchical organizations, and they have much to learn before moving to a culture of empowerment.

Empowerment, at its most practical level, is a process for unleashing the potential and power in people—the knowledge and motivation that people possess. Surprisingly, creating a culture of empowerment consists of only a few key steps, but they involve important contradictions and value changes for managers and employees alike. Every organization and every person in the organization who chooses to make the journey to empowerment will encounter significant challenges along the way, but the end result will yield astonishing results.

The critical first step to empowerment is for management to share sensitive corporate information through all levels of the company—market share, competition strategies, growth opportunities, real costs, profitability figures, cutback possibilities, and so forth. People must understand how the company is doing if their knowledge is to be usefully applied. Without information people cannot possibly make responsible decisions; with information they are almost compelled to act responsibly. A more subtle reason for information sharing is that this is the quickest way to rebuild the trust that is bankrupt in most organizations today. It lets people know “we are in this thing together,” and it encourages them to take the risk to use their power for the organization. Without information sharing, empowerment will not get off the ground.

Once information sharing has set the stage through enhanced responsibility and trust, the other two keys come into play. The second key is truly a paradox. To reach an empowerment level where people have more freedom to use their power, you have to start with more—not less structure. People have to unlearn how to operate with a bureaucratic mind-set. Then managers and employees alike must learn to use values and vision clarity, collaborative goal setting, shared decision-making procedures, and partnership-based performance management systems to support a new culture of empowerment. Only with such structure can apathy or chaos be avoided during the change to empowerment.

The third key is just as critical as the first two. Teams must replace the hierarchy as the key decision-making instrument. Empowerment is dependent upon teams gradually taking over many of the traditional manager roles—hiring, firing, performance reviews, work schedules, budgets, problem solving, etc. But this transformation is a journey that takes time and also takes people through another challenge. When the teams reach an inevitable point of disillusionment with empowerment and they need strong leadership, managers are often just as confused as the employees. An uncomfortable leadership vacuum is created, but this vacuum can be used to create the very empowerment that is desired. This vacuum draws or sucks employee knowledge out to help solve problems if communication and information are allowed to continue to flow.

The lessons learned from a variety of organizations over 15 years have taught us that these three keys can lead managers and employees to a culture of empowerment. Each leader must choose whether or not to use these keys and whether or not to stay the difficult and challenging course. The journey to empowerment is not easy, but it may be essential for corporate survival in today’s complex and dynamic business environment.