Written by: John Starling, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Our world relies on cooperation and support for smooth functioning. However, sometimes the support people provide to others can be counterproductive. How does that happen, you ask? Because the support crosses the thin line between enabling and empowerment.
Empowerment is a sustainable way of providing support in order that the person becomes increasingly self-supporting (and can even come to support others), while enablement is merely short-term help so something gets done.
Employee empowerment is a way to create organizations that can sustain their success. Many employee empowerment benefits can be reaped when appropriate employee empowerment tools are used. You can read the article further to understand the multiple nuances associated with employee empowerment.
Enabling is the genesis of empowerment, and not the other way around.
You may enable individuals by showing them the means to achieve something, such as by offering tools or counseling. But empowerment is attained when that individual is ‘enabled’ to explore possibilities, experiment with ideas, and even fail before coming up with a unique solution that’s unique to only them. Empowerment is when you help them find what comes from within—it’s personal and self-sufficient.
Getting Comfortable with Employee Empowerment
Employee empowerment is associated with giving employees some degree of control over their work. That means, employees get autonomy in making decisions and regular day-to-day tasks. Empowering employees is also associated with job enlargement (horizontal development of the scope of a job) and job enrichment (vertical development of an employee’s roles and duties).
Employee empowerment might look like it concerns employees, but it is a process that requires changes in the structure of an organization. An organization working towards employee empowerment keeps its customers at the top while keeping top management at a foundational level. For example, Zappos is a company that promotes its customers-first policy by allowing its employees to make the best decision for its customers. This kind of freedom fosters employee happiness and original ideas.
Employee Empowerment Diagram
Source: ASQ
Enabling employees makes employees good followers, but employee empowerment results in good leaders and supervisors who can take an organization further. Harvard Business Review conducted a meta-analysis that revealed that empowering leaders developed employees who were more creative and demonstrated good citizenship behavior. Employee empowerment benefits also include enhanced job performance, increased trust between leaders and their teams, and enhanced creativity.
Several employee empowerment tools, such as open book management practices and even technological tools, can result in the self-directed growth of employees. Approaches like individual empowerment can result in increased self-confidence among employees. Working on empowerment as teams can improve team camaraderie and make work exciting.
“Reach our common objectives according to our common values, and I have no questions as to how we get there.” – John Starling, CEO Pietential
5 Ways to Incorporate Employee Empowerment at Work
Businesses that want sustainable success cannot ignore the benefits of employee empowerment strategies. Here are 5 ways to incorporate employee empowerment at work:
1. Use communication to your advantage:
They say communication is key. And they are not wrong. Leaders who ace their communication game with their team have figured out a major tenet of good leadership. Asking team members about their needs, ensuring their team is diverse and inclusive, and supporting them in their self-improvement journey—are all signs of leaders with good communication skills.
Good leaders also encourage receiving and giving feedback. Constructive criticism and feedback form the backbone of an empowerment culture and, ultimately, self-improvement and team goal achievement.
Communication can also exist in the form of the availability of information about a company. A clear description of its core values, what the company stands for, and how we can live it and improve it—all contribute to making empowered employees capable of making decisions on their own that move the company’s mission forward.
2. Allow creativity:
Empowered employees have the freedom to be creative at work. Creativity at work can range from job crafting to accepting appropriate business suggestions from employees. Employee empowerment happens when managers delegate roles and allow fresh perspectives on how to get work done.
Creativity at work also results in enhanced employee engagement. Leaders can further define the roles where creativity is allowed and to which degree.
3. Provide the right tools:
Craftsmen work with their tools, and for the craft of employee empowerment, leaders need tools too. In-house programs that provide employees training, software that help in assessment, information that help in making better decisions, and efficient work techniques can all form important employee empowerment tools.
4. Let the mistakes happen:
Employee empowerment is a conduit to self-improvement. And there is no improvement without mistakes. For effective employee empowerment, the possibility of making mistakes and finding a solution when failure occurs should always be greater than the fear of making mistakes and their repercussions. Leaders should empower employees to find solutions in any situation rather than giving them no room for a slip-up, and pushing top-down improvement as a consequence.
5. Know when to step in:
Enabling is a limiting mindset that can only take an organization as far as the leader’s line of sight goes. But empowerment is a working philosophy that gives employees a foundation to work on, and supports them in morphing their fresh vision to the best interest of their organization. However, empowerment doesn’t mean unchecked and haphazard freedom. Leaders should know when to step in, which employee to delegate work to, and which boundaries to set.
Conclusion:
Employee empowerment is a tool in itself that results in employee experience enhancement, employee engagement—and it gets results. On an individual level, it is a journey of supported self-improvement. But the support is key, it cannot exist without organizational support; a business has to collectively take conscious steps toward making employee empowerment happen. Standing there with one foot forward and leaning into an empowerment culture, leaders can learn about their employees and coach them up to make better decisions and act with more confidence that their work matters.
Business leaders can support employees better by assessing employee needs through Pietential, which is a platform that doesn’t enable, but empowers.
Pietential is an Emotional Index and business intelligence tool helps business leaders visualize and understand the gaps in their employees’ wellbeing, so they can put in place coaching and mentoring programs using the metrics it provides them. The tool allows you to create custom demographic cohorts that organizations can use to assess their population’s wellbeing, and even has an alert system to monitor dips in wellbeing. The data derived from the tool can be turned into actionable insights toward achieving individual and organizational goals, while empowering employees to reach their true potential.
John Starling, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
For over 20 years John Starling built and led management consulting firms focused on growth strategy and personal development. He advised, trained, and consulted hundreds of companies around the world (from start-ups to members of the Fortune 50) and has professionally coached countless individuals. In 2019 he founded Pietential – "The Life Balance and Population Wellbeing Realization System".
Pietential is a real-time emotional Index of the people you lead and serve. For Enterprise companies, SMBs, NGOs, NPOs and Advisors, Pietential is a wellbeing benchmarking, monitoring and improvement platform that also allows you to prove the efficacy of your internal internal programs. It provides organizations with an Administrative Dashboard displaying aggregated (and anonymized unless shared by the User) comparative data visualizations of the emotional wellbeing of the different segments of the populations you lead and serve allowing you to better understand you – and how your people are doing.
Dedicated to the communities in which he's lived, John has also founded two youth programs: a mentoring & martial arts school for at-risk young people in Baltimore, Maryland (The School of the Way) and a girls soccer club in South Korea (Pride Girls Soccer). He is also the author of an illustrated rhyming children's book "Flight of the Platypus –– a story of self-discovery".
John's life philosophy is "If you can see it you can be it" and he's dedicated to helping others visualize and improve their wellbeing through Pietential.
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