A Tragic Example of How the Lack of Employee Empowerment Extinguished 11 Lives

A Tragic Example of How the Lack of Employee Empowerment Extinguished 11 Lives

A lot has been written about the power of employee empowerment; a belief among employees that they are endowed with the authority and capability of making decisions and taking actions that are consistent with the goals and objectives of the organization, without running it by higher level authorities.

Usually, the people doing the job every day are the experts', they know how to improve quality, reduce cycle times, increase productivity, reduce costs and perform the job safely. Unfortunately, because many decisions are technically above many employees' pay grade, they are required to defer those decisions to their superiors, even though they know the appropriate path to take.

Sometimes those superiors will make decisions based on politics, career aspirations, financial incentives or other factors that are not purely operational. Jason Anderson was one of those experts'.

Mr. Anderson was an experienced toolpusher for Transocean, the drilling contractor for BP on the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon drilling platform and he had significant safety concerns resulting from a number of practices on the rig.

During Mr. Anderson's last rotation before going back out on the rig, he expressed those concerns to his wife Shelly Anderson. According to Mrs. Anderson, he was so concerned about practices on the rig and potential accidents that might result, he spent his last trip home getting his affairs in order.

This is the way Mrs. Anderson described Mr. Anderson's mood during his last rotation home to NBC's Lisa Myers; "Everything seemed to be pressing to Jason about getting things in order. In case something happened. Teaching me how to do certain things on the motor home so that I could go and do things with the kids, make sure that I knew how to do everything."

According to Mrs. Anderson, her husband also had a will drawn up and talked about his hopes and dreams for their daughter and son. After leaving home to return to the platform, Mr. Anderson would telephone his wife from the rig several times and Mrs. Anderson felt he was clearly worried.

Mrs. Anderson went on to tell Ms. Myers; "They were getting pressure from someplace higher up to do things that maybe weren't exactly the way Jason thought that they should be. It was a safety issue."

Ms. Myers also reported that Mrs. Anderson told her that, "Jason's father told us Jason was concerned that BP, which controlled the rig, kept wanting to stray from procedures to finish the well faster, which Jason considered unsafe."

Before Mr. Anderson finished his rotation on the Horizon, he was killed along with ten co-workers.

Mr. Anderson knew there were problems with the practices employed by Transocean and BP, after all, as the toolpusher, he was the expert'. Had he been empowered to make decisions and take actions that were consistent with the espoused goals and objectives of Transocean and BP, this horrific accident quite possibly could have been avoided.

One of Mr. Anderson's co-workers, was one of the last to escape the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. Michael Williams, chief electronics technician on the oil platform gave "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley an account of his last few minutes on the flaming platform and the unsafe practices that lead up to the disaster.

Mr. Williams recalls the following to Mr. Pelley; "I'm hearing hissing. Engines are over-revving and then all of a sudden, all the lights in my shop just started getting brighter and brighter and brighter and I knew something bad was getting ready to happen."

After surviving the explosions, Mr. Williams went on to tell Mr. Pelley; "The well kicked, the safety systems failed, and men lost their lives. I don't know how else to say it, all the things that they told us could never happen, happened. You know, on a daily basis, we were told, 'We're going to send you home better than the day you got here. It wasn't true that day.'"

These men knew there were problems aboard the Horizon well before the explosions. Had they been and felt empowered, they could have averted the disaster, after all there were rubber shavings found in the drilling mud that some suspected likely came from the seal on the blowout preventer. In fact, there must have been several opportunities at several levels in Transocean and BP where employees could have acted in an empowered way to take control of the situation and get things back on a safe track.

That is the power of empowerment and self-efficacy. The terms do not have to be just HR speak' or aspirational. They can become part of an organization's culture and an employee's behavioral traits and characteristics. If we choose not to work towards that goal, we are destined to repeat the mistakes of the past and operate in less efficient and effective work environments.

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