Leadership Empowerment

I was in outstation this week, I have met a number of clients who have problems with their managers’ empowerment. They do not believe in a leader’s power and influence increase when he or she shares power with others. They believe that to share the glory of achieving a specific project objective is to give away their power.

In fact, a truly powerful leader makes team members feel powerful and able to accomplish tasks on their own. To empower others is to be perceived as an influential person. This week, I would like to share with Eastern Times reader on the nature of empowerment and its practices

Nature of empowerment
Empowerment refers to passing decision making authority and responsibility from managers to group members. Almost any form of participative management, shared decision making , and delegation can be regarded as empowerment.
There are four components of empowerment, meaning, competence, self determination and impact.

Meaning is the value of a work goal, evaluated in relation to a person’s ideals or standards. Work has meaning when there is a fit between the requirements of a work role and a person’s beliefs, values and behavior. A person who is doing meaningful work is likely to feel empowered.

Competence, or self efficacy, is an individual’s belief in his or her capability to perform a particular task well. The person who feels competent feels that he or she has the capability to meet the performance requirements in a given situation, such as a credit analyst saying, “ I have been given the authority to evaluate credit tasks up to RM100,000 and I know I can do it well. “

Self determination is an individual’s feeling of having a choice in initiating and regulating actions. A high level form of self determination occurs when a worker feels that he or she can choose which is the best method to solve a particular problem. Self determination also involves such consideration as choosing the work place and work site. A highly empowered worker might choose to perform the required work while on a cruise rather than remain in the office.
Impact is the degree to which the worker can influence strategic, administrative, or operating outcomes on the job. Instead of feeling there is no choice but to follow the company’s course, he or she might have a say in the future of the company. A middle manager might say, “ here is an opportunity for recruiting minority employees that we should exploit. And here is my action plan for doing so. “

Empowering Practices.
The practices that foster empowerment supplement standard approaches to participative management, such as conferring with team members before reaching a decision.

Foster Initiative and responsibility
A leader can empower team members by fostering greater initiative and responsibility in their assignments. For example, one bank manager transformed what has been a constricted branch manager’s job into a branch president’s role. Managers were then evaluated on the basic of deposits because they have control over them. After transformation , branch managers were allowed to stay with one branch rather than being rotated every three years.

Link work activities to the goals of the organization
Empowerment works better when the empowered activities are aligned with the strategic goals of the organization. Empowerment workers who have responsibility to carry out activities that support the major goals of the organization will identify more with the organization. At the same time, they will develop a feeling of being a partner in the business.

Provide ample information
An axiom of effective empowerment is that employees should have ample information about everything that affects their work. Especially important is for workers to fully understand the impact of their actions on the organization’s costs and profits. Arrived with such information, employees are more likely to make decisions that have a positive influence on the bottom line.
Allow Group members to choose methods
Under ideal conditions the leader explains to the individual or group what needs to be done and lets the people involved choose the method. Explaining why the tasks need to be performed is also important. One of the roles of a true professional is to choose the method for accomplishing a task, such as a tax consultant deciding how to prepare the taxes for a business owner.

Encourage self leadership
Encouraging team members to lead themselves is at the heart of empowerment. When employees practice self leadership, they feel empowered. Said Toastmasters International District Governor Cat Angus that, “ we just let our people follow their instincts and apply their common sense and it worked out fine to achieve the organizational goals. “

Implement team based human resource policies
Teams are more likely to feel empowered when the organization implements a variety of team based human resource policies. Among these policies are basing pay in part of team performance and allowing team members to participate in decisions about the selection, training, discipline and performance evaluation of other team members.
The 360 degrees concept of staff performance appraisal brings together the team members’ strength because every team member has the opportunity to evaluate each other.

Establish Limits to empowerment
One of the major situations in which empowerment create disharmony, dissatisfaction, and dysfunction is when workers lack a clear perception of the boundaries of empowerment. The general problem is that empowered group members may feel that they can now make decisions unilaterally without conferring with managers, team leaders, or other team members. Limits to empowerment might mean explaining to employees that they have more authority than before, but still they cannot engage in such activities as the following:-
• Set their own wages
• Set the wages of top management
• Decide on dividends to shareholders
• Make downsizing decisions’
• Hire mostly friends and relatives
• Work less than 60 hours for half day
• Take tow hour lunch breaks
• Devote three hours a day on internet surfing for recreational purposes.

Conclusion
For empowerment to be effective, a manager or a leader need to perform some of the tasks depends on circumstances. A basic management principle is to obtain feedback on the delegated tasks. A responsible manager does not delegate a complex assignment to a group member, provided that he or she is satisfied that the team members are competent enough to perform the assignment. Thus for empowerment to work in an organization, the manager / leader needs to continuously train their team members and identify the competency skills gap. Provide the team members the necessary training needed so that they are competent to perform the assignment at any time