Most leaders say they empower their teams, but no one is actually giving up power. So, what's really going on?
A common phrase I often hear when I'm speaking to potential new clients is that they want to empower their teams, but if I'm being brutally honest, what they're often doing is working on things like self-confidence or motivation. They're not actually giving power to teams to get work done.
I want to share why our approach to empowerment is often misinformed, and give you three practices that you can start if you truly want to give your team power to make an impact.
What is empowerment anyway?
Let's take a moment to focus on two definitions of empowerment. The first is the process of becoming stronger or more confident.
The second is the authority or the power given to someone to do something.
Now, when it comes to empowerment in teams and in the workplace, what we're often doing is putting our energy, our focus, our resources into the first one, the process of becoming stronger or more confident. We're focusing on it as an individualistic aspect that it's the individual who needs more motivation, more inspiration, more self-confidence in order to be empowered. When the reality is, we need to be focusing on that second definition.
Rarely do people in teams or in the workplace have any true power. They don't have a say in how or where they work. They don't have any real decision making power in order to get work done, and they certainly have no say or voice in shaping the organization or the company itself, but yet we love talking about empowerment.
When people say to me they empower their teams, I often ask, what does this look like in practice? And barely can they give me a concrete example of what this looks like in practice, because so often they're focused on the individual rather than the system as a whole of being able to share power.
I hear things like “we allow them to”, or “we trust them to”. It's very ambiguous and unclear, but there's no exact process by which people are able to make any kind of decisions or have power in their work. It's almost as if people treat their teams like these well-behaved children who have been allowed a small amount of responsibility.
Individual vs. Systemic Change
Brace yourself for an unpopular opinion. Why is it that we lean towards the individual nature of empowerment, believing that it's an individual flaw or failing that we need to work on, rather than looking at the systemic change that is required more holistically in the business?
In my opinion, it's easier if we work on the individual aspect because then we've only got the individual to blame. It's their lack of inspiration, their lack of motivation that's holding them back from being empowered.
If you Google or even search on YouTube for videos around empowering teams, there is so much condescending advice that puts all the blame on the individual, and how leaders have to almost coerce empowerment. We're providing training, we're getting you inspired, so why aren't you empowered?
I feel like this quote from Peter Block sums it up completely.
“Conversations about empowerment always seem to turn to a discussion of how we're going to change other people.”
The second thing I want to highlight is that sharing power requires a high level of trust.
It feels risky to give people power to be able to make decisions not only on behalf of their work, but also sometimes on behalf of the business. What if they make a bad decision?
This next comment might sting just a little bit, and that's because to some people, if we're sharing our power, it means that we're weakening our own in some way. It's this lack mindset; if they have power, then I don't. A belief that power is finite.
We like saying empowerment out loud, but we're not so comfortable at living it. If you're serious about empowering your teams and not just saying it out loud, here are a few practices.
It all begins with mindset
If we're going to get remotely comfortable with sharing power or distributing power to the teams, we have to change our mindsets from that of treating people like well-behaved children who are earning their power to treating people like responsible adults that know how to work, when to work, and how to get things done.
We need the mindset shift of treating adults like adults.
The reason it's so important to do the mindset work is because we can try and change the operating system, we can distribute decision making power, but if we're still in that outdated, untrustworthy mindset, then things are going to falter very, very quickly. We need to have a strong belief that this is how work should be done, and that we can trust each other to the level of treating each other as adults. I cannot highlight enough how important it is that we do the mindset work as well as the practices.
Distribute decision-making
The second practice is obvious: distribute decision making power either to other roles or to other teams. We want to make sure that as many decisions as possible are sitting with the team who are doing the work. Which decisions impact their work, and how can they take authority over those decisions?
Consider Dynamic Governance
The third practice is more of a long-term approach, but it's something that I recommend you consider; and that is redesigning your company to include more dynamic governance.
What I mean by this is, we don't just want teams to be making decisions about how they work and their particular area of work, we want to include them in how the company shapes policies and moves forward.
Including them in the way policies are shaped in the wider organization, is truly giving them power in terms of the future of the organization and the future of their work.
The reason dynamic governance is something to consider is for three particular things, first of all, it's that psychological ownership. When we take part in shaping something, we take greater ownership over it, and also when we are able to include more of the collective, we have greater collective wisdom, diversity, and true inclusion.
Now I know that creating an environment of true empowerment is not easy, hence why I do what I do, and work with founders and their teams to support them on this journey. Making the real systemic changes far outweighs the time and resources that go into this false perception of empowerment that everybody knows in your company is not going to change anything.
