Empowerment is not a Zero Sum Game
Empowerment is not a zero sum game where management or employees
, win or lose. When implemented correctly employee empowerment is a collaboration, where both parties benefit. This is something the most efficient and effective organizations understand. This is something perennially rated best companies' understand.
Enlightened companies are not threatened by empowered employees; instead, they nurture and embrace employee empowerment.
Jack Welch, former General Electric CEO and oft referred to as the greatest CEO in American history understood the potential of employee empowerment as demonstrated in a memo to his shareholders within which he wrote:
"If you want to get the benefit of everything employees have, you've got to free them make everybody a participant. Everybody has to know everything, so they can make the right decisions by themselves."
The most effective employee empowerment practices focus on both the organization and the individual. Using the 3D Employee Empowerment ModelTM employers are able to accelerate and more broadly institutionalize the behaviors necessary to sustain culture change.
Why is it important to make the effort to empower your workforce? It is important because every level of your organization benefits.
1. The organization will operate at its most efficient and effective because your workforce will operate with the mentality of an owner, reducing cycle times and costs and, improving quality and production.
2. The department/team will operate with a renewed and common purpose, fueled by a team leader that is forward-thinking, able to delegate more, spend less time managing and spend more time leading team members.
3. Employees will voluntarily contribute more to the organization through greater effort and creativity because they understand their mission, their importance to the success of the enterprise and are enabled to do what it takes to get the job done. They are entrusted with greater responsibilities which result in higher job satisfaction, performance and personal development.
Some Managers May be Threatened
Autocratic managers that need to be in total control and dictate the day-to-day activities of their team will be threatened by an empowered workforce. They will be uncomfortable with the loss of power and control over their minion.
Often they will feel their authority has been undermined and the inmates are running the asylum'. Within your organization, there are probably a limited number of autocratic managers and those can be addressed through training and development, or removing them from their supervisory role.
Most managers are not autocratic and will not be threatened by empowered employees. It may take them a while to understand and embrace how an empowered team changes their role from managers to leaders, but once they assume those new responsibilities, managers will began to see how much easier and productive it makes their jobs!
Sustained Competitive Advantage
The most powerful advantage of employee empowerment is that it creates a sustainable competitive advantage.
Over the years, organization's use of the assembly line, technology, access to capital, patents or information created a competitive advantage. However, history has taught us that it is very difficult to sustain that advantage over time.
Competitors adapt because traditional competitive advantages can be documented and duplicated.
Developing a workforce with an owner's mentality' that works every day in the best interest of the organization is much harder to duplicate; consequently, once achieved, an empowered workforce creates a competitive advantage that is enduring and enhanced over time.
So employee empowerment is not a zero sum game. It truly is a collaboration that benefits the organization and its employees.
Empowerment is not a Zero Sum Game
By: Pierre A. Towns
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