Oberservation of the Empowerment

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Introduction

In this article, members of the Editorial Adviso-ry Board for this Journal review the state of empowerment in today’s organizations.

William B. Harley

Generally speaking, the state of empowermentin organizations today has improved signiﬁcant-ly beyond its position ﬁve years ago, but a hugetask remains if empowerment is to reach its fullpotential.Pockets of empowerment within organiza-tions are becoming increasingly common arewhere low- and mid-level managers have coura-geously established a subculture of empower-ment within an organization which is largelyunempowered. Organizations which have estab-lished pervasive cultures of empowerment arestill quite uncommon.In my experience, the primary source of resistance is upper-level managers who seemunwilling to confront the disparity between theempowering values they espouse and the disem-powering behaviors they model. These upper-level managers often respond from ingrainedhabits or compulsions with controlling behaviorwhich not only reinforces the controlling ten-dencies of some lower-level managers, butdestroys the climate of trust and safety whichmost other managers need if they are to risk experimentation with empowering behavior.Because these upper-level managers wereusually promoted to their current positions fordemonstrating skills in the use of types of con-trolling behavior, in many cases they are beingchallenged to change attributes which are tiedclosely to their sense of identity and self-worth.Changes of this type require conscious choicesbased not only on self-awareness but also onlevels of humility, courage, detachment andcommitment which most upper-level managersscarcely seem able to muster. Meanwhile, anever-increasing cadre of low and mid-levelmanagers, skilled in empowerment, arecreeping up the management ranks.

Joan Pastor

I have mixed reactions about the state of empowerment at this time. The bad news is that

Observations on thestate of empowermentin today’s organization

Linda Logan,William B. Harley, Joan Pastor, Linda S. Wing, Naftaly Glasman, Lee Hanson, David Collins, Barbara A. Cleary, Jacqueline Miller and Paul Hegedahl

The authorsLinda Logan

is Editor of

Empowerment in Organizations

;

William B. Harley

is President, Harley Training & Consulting,St Paul, USA;

Joan Pastor

is President, Joan Pastor & Associ-ates, Oceanside, USA;

Linda S. Wing

is Coach for Organiza-tional Effectiveness, Human Systems Design, Inc., Edina, USA;

Naftaly Glasman

is Professor of Education and PoliticalScience, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA;

LeeHanson

is Assistant Professor, University of California, SanBernardino, USA;

David Collins

is Senior Lecturer in HumanResource Management, University of Sunderland, UK;

Barbara A. Cleary

is with PQ Systems, Inc., Dayton, USA;

Jacqueline Miller

is President, jmiller associates, Burnsville,USA; and

Paul Hegedahl

is Editor of

Ledelse I Dag

, Denmark.

Abstract

Each member of the Journal’s Editorial Advisory Board reviewsthe state of empowerment in today’s organizations.

companies are realizing how difficult it is to“empower” people. Many companies (if not themajority), and the managers and humanresource people within them, do not trulyunderstand what empowerment is or exactlywhat it entails. Furthermore, there are manypeople who claim to be “experts” in empower-ment, and yet create more problems for organi-zations. I found myself brought into companiesseveral times this past year to fix problemsprevious consultants had created. Finally, peo-ple are so overworked right now owing to down-sizing (and so afraid of making a mistakebecause they do not want to be the next to go)that many are interpreting empowerment asanother responsibility which they do not wantdumped on their shoulders. Downsizing createsbile in people’s mouths, and so they are oftensuspicious of even the best CEO’s good inten-tions.On the good side, downsizing has created thenecessity to push authority down and work more in teams. Also, I am seeing much flattercompanies now which are ready to go on to thenext step in their growth. Management is finallybecoming more sophisticated, and more com-mitted to empowerment; once they experiencehow it really works, managers have much lessproblem letting go and letting their employeesget more involved. A lot of success in successful“empowerment” still goes back to senior man-agement’s intentions, or perceived intentions.One clothing retailer with whom I am cur-rently working has always succeeded by lettingother retailers set the fads and fashions. Once afad looks like it will endure, the retailer jumps inand starts producing the same. However, afteryears of success with this approach it has discov-ered it cannot remain a “follower”. To be suc-cessful in today’s global market it has to be oneof the forerunners, for those who stragglebehind may get left behind – the market ischanging constantly, and quickly.So this company has been working to stream-line the organization, and I am currently work-ing with its distribution center to help to set upteams that will eventually become self-managed,helping them to increase greatly the amount of cross-functional interaction, identifying andincreasing JIT training critical to people’s work,hiring the right people, upgrading the wholecomputer system, and so on. The vice-presidentis cracking down on managers who cannot orwill not change with the changing organizationalculture – we are currently working on one keymanager who, in particular, has a hard timeletting go and letting his people take over deci-sion making and other work which they aremore than ready and willing to do. We are get-ting management and employees to talk honest-ly with one another and keep one another muchmore informed. It is exciting to see the growthso far.

Linda S. Wing

When Linda Logan asked me to comment onmy view of empowerment as we enter into 1996,I eagerly said “yes”. I am in the camp of busi-ness management consultants who still believethe full productive capacity of the workforce willonly be achieved by unleashing the full creativepotential of the workers, including the manager-ial contributors. In order to be fair, however, Ihave to express my concern that the concept of empowerment has not made a signiﬁcantimpact in most organizations. In fact, manyorganizations have gone back to a more hierar-chical structure, arguing that empowermenttechniques have done nothing to enhance theachievement of organizational goals. Why mightthis be the case when, intuitively, empowermentdisplays such good business sense? Unleashinghundreds of minds surely should result in betterand more fruitful outcomes. Why, then, does asigniﬁcant leap in productivity elude thoseorganizations attempting to implement empow-erment? I believe that the answer may lie inunderstanding the knowledge worker and thefuture role of management in a society of knowl-edge workers. The following is a clear, personal-ly experienced example of the problem.At a recent national conference, a knowl-edgeable and inspirational leader walked to thepodium to deliver a “state of the industry”speech to conference attendees. During thespeech, the speaker asked the audience toanswer six questions relative to the state of theindustry, then asked each of the attendees toshare their responses with colleagues seated intheir immediate vicinity. Each of the partici-pants answered the questions independently,then shared their responses with colleaguesseated nearby. I shared with four colleagues. We

Observations on the state of empowerment in today’s organizations

Linda Logan

et al.Empowerment in OrganizationsVolume 4 · Number 1 · 1996 · 6–11

were surprised to find we had all answered thesix questions basically in the same manner; eachof us had a similar view of the world, the prima-ry difference being the language used todescribe that view; the strategic intent of thethoughts was about the same. This was a sur-prising display of the collective knowledge baseof the knowledge workers in the room, and theirinterpretation of their world. This amazingdisplay of the “collective” went unnoticed,however, because the speaker failed to ask foraudience responses. The speaker went on toanswer the six questions raised, answering withbasically the same answers we had given in ourquick debriefing session, leaving us as listenerssomewhat confused and a little frustrated. Inessense, this person wasted an hour and a half of our time giving us the answers to the questionswe had already answered. Being the profession-als we are, we wondered why the time was notspent more productively in problem solving orresolution. Instead, we invested the time andenergy of 1,200 professionals redefining whatwe already knew to be true!This experiential event showed me the powerof the collective knowledge of the knowledgeworkers. It also demonstrated for me the linger-ing problem we have with leaders who stillbelieve their role is giving answers to a work-force which is now working from the samedatabase of information. As the information gapcloses, this simple example shows that the roleof leader has changed drastically from “showingand telling” information to:•providing the workforce with an opportunityto understand their commonalities anddifferences of opinion;•asking important questions which lead thegroup to think and resolve important issuesfacing the group;•acting as a facilitator/resource gatherer andfacilitator to aid in shaping an appropriateoutcome.Other roles may certainly emerge, but this list isa good start. Imagine the power of a group of 1,200 professionals in the room that nightbeginning to identify possible solutions to thequestions raised – a daunting prospect and onewhich would require “real” leadership!While empowerment has not yet made theinroads into productivity which some of usbelieve possible, I believe we are close to under-standing that the conceptual problem does notlie in the concept of empowerment, but rather inthe redefinition of organizational structures andleadership practices which diminish its impact.

Naftaly Glasman

Universities, especially those which are researchoriented, work under a shared governancesystem by faculty and administration at alllevels, from the campus academic senate andchief executive officer all the way to departmentfaculty committees and chairs. Progress towardempowerment might be measured by theincrease in the time shared governance and isnot violated by the administration. The keyissue in observing and understanding violationsof empowerment is the definition and identifica-tion of the point of origin of the authority in agiven area. For example, resource-driven pur-chases of equipment and faculty-driven promo-tion processes may look like empoweringprocesses which begin at opposite ends fromeach other.In my own department, empowerment hasswung back and forth from one end of the pen-dulum to the other with the introduction of various factors such as the current chair’s indi-vidual characteristics; the involvement of thefaculty; the characteristics of the faculty; eco-nomic conditions; and the quality of students,to name a few.

Lee Hanson

It appears to me that empowerment, defined asteam-based organization, is becoming increas-ingly common within the “core” labor market of corporate America, that more or lesspermanently-employed population providingthe strategic and technical services firms cannotdo without. While this is desirable, the problemis that the core constitutes a minority of theworkforce, the people who are best educatedand most highly skilled. A vastly larger “periph-ery” labor market, including low-skilled, oftentemporary, employees may be experiencingunempowered conditions which are as onerousas anything under mass production, only worsetoday because wages and benefits are decliningwhile job security vanishes. Should an “empow-

Observations on the state of empowerment in today’s organizations

Linda Logan

et al.Empowerment in OrganizationsVolume 4 · Number 1 · 1996 · 6–11

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