Team empowerment can prove to be completely ineffective and meaningless if an organization does not support empowerment with a few key factors:

Inadequate Investment in Training and Development: Training and development is an essential ingredient for the effectiveness of team empowerment so that the team is geared to take on the challenge of their new role. Without training the members to the standard they are expected to deliver it is unlikely the team will produce the results desired.

 Inadequate Access to Information and Other Resources: Without access to the latest information an empowered team will not be able to make quick decisions. If they don’t have adequate financial, technological or human resources at their disposal then they can’t implement their decisions properly. Even technical experts within the company are an important resource. For example, if sales teams can invite company experts such as engineers who have direct knowledge of the product to important sales meetings, it might help them immensely in closing the deal. If they have access to a CRM database they can create better selling strategies and even design innovative sales approaches like upselling, cross selling or bundling.

Inadequate Guidelines on Empowerment: Empowerment requires a company to provide a framework within which the empowered team is allowed to act on its own. Inadequate guidelines can lead to ineffective unstable teams if they are given too much power without proper direction or control. It can lead to chaos and losses for the company when the team begins to make decisions that adversely affect the company. It is therefore essential to clearly establish the level of autonomy that the teams actually have. There has to be some amount of decision making scope and clear guidelines on the extent of power.

Inadequate Encouragement and Support: The senior manager has to be prepared to allow some of the decision making to be passed to the members of the team. In some cases this may actually be favored by the senior manager freeing him up to do other things. However, some managers may be reluctant to pass control or power to someone else, either though issues of control or a lack of trust in the teams ability. The senior manager has to be willing to give up a certain amount of control and display confidence and commitment in the team process and in the team’s ability to handle its new responsibility.

Empowered teams have been the rage in the corporate world since the nineties, and it is now proven that teams that are equipped to work on their own bring in greater efficiency.

The other facet of empowerment is the human angle – individuals on empowered teams feel greater satisfaction with their jobs. It’s a sense of importance and pride in doing your bit in the overall scheme of things that creates a sense of well being. It also helps people grow, think independently and explore their full potential.
Reprinted from Team Building, www.teambuildingportal.com

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by Charles R. McConnell

The term “empowerment” rose to prominence in the late 1980s and saw considerable use through the 1990s in conjunction with the total quality management (TQM) movement. Its use has been so widespread that the term itself has become a buzzword. We’re told repeatedly that we must empower employees to enable them to make their best possible contributions to organizational success; we’re told this as though it were something new, some late-twentieth-century discovery.

The verb “empower” contains its own simple definition: to give power to. A look into any dictionary or thesaurus reveals that one of the several synonyms for “empowerment” is “delegation.” A similar look at “delegation” shows “empowerment” as a synonym. Delegation and empowerment have essentially the same meaning, yet many present day experts tell us: Don’t just delegate to employees–empower them.

Although empowerment may be described in a variety of ways, its essence remains giving employees control of their jobs and letting them make their own decisions and solve their own problems. Therefore, there’s no difference between empowerment and proper delegation. Therein lies the problem; delegation has been so widely misused and abused that the term itself has become hopelessly tarnished. The conscientious delegating manager—or honest empowering manager—clearly defines employees’ limits and keeps hands off as long as they operate within these limits and deliver the expected results.

Although delegation and empowerment have essentially the same meaning, in practice they’ve been viewed quite differently. With empowerment’s prominence as a buzzword, some people are behaving as though this concept is a vast improvement over mere delegation. But if the concepts are really identical, what happened to delegation?

What happened to delegation took decades of regarding it as little more than assigning work to employees. Proper delegation, however, has always consisted of making workers responsible for task completion and also giving them the resources and authority required to complete the tasks. True empowerment is identical to proper delegation: you give an employee a problem to solve or a task to complete, specify the desired outcome, and provide the authority and resources necessary to get the job done.

The problem at the heart of most difficulties with delegation—or empowerment—is a problem of management style and approach, and it’s a control issue with those managers who have difficulty surrendering control over task performance. Some managers can’t let go sufficiently to allow delegation or empowerment to work. Their still-authoritarian management style sends a contradictory message to employees: You’re free to do whatever you need to do, as long as it’s the same thing we would do.

Whether it’s called delegation or empowerment, the process will work as intended only if the manager commits in advance to accepting the employees decisions and results. Sound risky? Sure it does; as a manager you remain responsible for the results your employees achieve, so you have a strong interest in making certain they do what they’re supposed to do (surely this is why so many managers are reluctant to relinquish any measure of control).

To truly empower employees:

·              Know your employees well. Know their strengths, weaknesses, capabilities, and limitations. Know what they can and can’t do; know them well enough to be able to judge which of them should be given what assignments.

·              Teach them what to do and how to do it. This is one of the weakest points in the delegation process as usually practiced; some managers tend to make an assignment and move on with inadequate attention to preparing the employee, when in reality this step can be time-consuming. The manager’s “reward” of time saved comes well in the future; to save time in the future usually requires spending more time in the present.

·              Provide all the authority necessary for task completion. Empowered employees should command all the resources needed to get the job done.

·              Define limits and expectations. This is crucial; employees need to know precisely the results you’re looking for and how far they can go in achieving those results. Focus on results; within reason, you needn’t be concerned with all the steps taken to achieve those results.

·              Turn them loose. Once you feel that they know what’s to be done, when it’s to be done, and what results are expected, let them do it.

·              Be available to provide advice and assistance as needed, but let them come to you. Don’t hover and don’t micromanage. Don’t intrude uninvited unless you see something going so wrong that it can’t be left alone.

In brief, true employee empowerment consists of educating employees in specific essential tasks, giving them what they need to get the job done, defining expected results, and turning them loose and staying out of their way unless your help becomes essential.

Reprinted with permissions from the The National Federation of Independent Business website, www.nfib.com 

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