Resources/Making Empowerment Work
Empowerment
means sharing your power with the people over whom you have power. Team
members are given the authority to make decisions that previously were
reserved for managers.
“If Everybody’s Empowered Who Needs a Leader?”
Some managers fear that their company will have no need for them after empowerment becomes the way of organisational life. If everyone is involved in what managers traditionally do, what role is left for managers?
In some companies the job of the Team Leader has been redesigned.
Traditional teams are replaced by “self-directed” teams that have no
permanent team leader; the team chooses a project leader [or two or more
leaders] for each project. Few companies now have totally self-directed
teams, however. Because most teams work on multiple projects, a modified
version may be used in which a permanent team leader serves the
important purpose of co-ordinating all team activities and providing
training and support.
Making Empowerment Work for You
Empowerment is not a panacea for curing all managerial problems. Rather it enhances collaborative efforts by giving every member of a team the power to get things done.
Major companies such as General Electric and Kodak have reported that instituting empowered teams has made them able to not only keep up but also move ahead in their tough, competitive industries. Thousands of smaller companies relate similar experiences.
To help an empowerment programme to succeed, follow these guidelines:
- The programme must have the full support of top management. Empowerment works most effectively when a company’s MD empowers its senior management group, which, in turn, passes that empowerment down through the organisation.
- Team members and team leaders should be trained in the techniques of empowerment. Because many companies assume that the transition to empowerment is more difficult for team members than for team leaders, they concentrate their training on team members. Because the programme is collaborative, supervisors [now team leaders] and employees [now team members] should be trained together by consultants or others who are knowledgeable in this type of work.
- All team members should be given full information about team projects; support to acquire necessary skills and techniques; freedom to interact with the team leader and any team member to accomplish the team’s goals and encouragement to use their initiative in planning and implementing projects.