The term empowerment is frequently used in the corporate context and is far too often equated with a cool tool or a current trend of the New Work movement. Empowerment linguistically means something like "self-empowerment" or "strengthening of autonomy". This makes it clear that it is a profound basic attitude towards enterprise design and a basic concept for various forms of work. Contrary to common assumptions, empowerment is not limited to leadership tasks, nor is it a special award or incentivisation for individuals. Empowerment is a matter of attitude — the core of the corporate philosophy that promotes values such as self-determination, freedom, and participation.
Empowerment entails companies giving their employees extensive and, in some areas, complete personal responsibility for designing and executing work processes. The associated empowerment within the organisational units leads to progressive decentralisation and flat decision-making structures. This strengthens the self-organisation and independence of the workforce. This is also accompanied by a shift in authority and decision-making power. Empowerment implemented in this way requires not only a high degree of trust but also a corporate culture that is aligned with it and the necessary talent.
Why
Companies with a consistent economic mindset must be convinced that changing forms of work and organisational structures pays off. Fundamentally changing empowerment in an entire organisation is expensive and associated with risks. What are the possible reasons behind these considerations?
Talent
Among the frequently mentioned reasons are attracting, motivating, and retaining employees. For companies competing fiercely for every talent in markets where labour is scarce, empowerment is a significant factor. Especially the younger and more highly-qualified talents today want much more than just a secure job with good compensation. They want to realise themselves, implement their own ideas, and work in a self-determined way. When choosing a job, they carefully evaluate the working environment, the corporate culture, and the leadership behaviour.
Agility
In the era of digitalisation, rates of change are increasing rapidly, product life cycles and development cycles are shortening radically, and disruption and spontaneity are on the rise. This development, known as VUCA (variability, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) in the professional world, requires companies to radically rethink and realign traditional processes across various domains. The agile working environment has emerged as a prominent solution in this regard. Decisions should be made within small agile teams directly on-site. Reaction speeds are expected to increase, and the degree of self-organisation must increase accordingly. Without empowerment, such working environments cannot be successfully realised.
Customer Centricity
In these fast-paced times, product quality and customer value must be appropriately kept in mind. The customer experience should not be compromised by the dynamics and changes. Therefore, the shorter the change cycles become, the closer the company must get to its customers regarding specific products or changes. In the agile world, the direct customer connection takes place in a decentralised and extensively self-organised manner within the respective team of the organisation. This is hardly possible without well-functioning empowerment.
Learning
In a self-organised organisation with strong empowerment, the degree of content-related penetration into individual topics is greater than in the case of work models with delimited subject areas. This increases the absorption of knowledge and the understanding of cause-effect relationships and interdependencies in the product, process, project, or company. In addition, greater personal responsibility usually leads to greater interest in the interrelationships and results of one's own work. Ultimately, professional interactions among individuals within the organisation are elevated, resulting in a greater transfer of knowledge. Self-organised work inevitably leads to self-organised learning.
How
The right level for increasing empowerment depends strongly on the maturity of the individuals and the organisation, necessitating a gradual approach supported by necessary organisational and skill development measures. Empowerment is closely linked with good talent management, proper delegation, regular feedback, and the right macro-management by leaders. The better these elements are already anchored in the company and the individuals are experienced in them, the faster and more successful an increase in empowerment will be.
Talent Management
Empowerment cannot be prescribed and not everyone is inclined to take on more responsibility or is interested in familiarising themselves with new content or tasks. It is important to identify suitable talents and to use and develop them in the right way so that empowerment and self-organisation contribute to success rather than stress and frustration. This necessitates the presence of a talent management approach in the company or, at the very least, a thorough understanding and management of the talents of the staff. There are detailed explanations on the topic of talent management in Enterneering®.
Delegation
Proper delegation is a key element of successful empowerment. It is important to clearly communicate not only the task but also the expectation of success or outcome and the timeframe for realisation. Furthermore, foreseeable obstacles or interactions within the company should also be adequately addressed. Depending on experience and maturity, delegation can be categorised into different degrees. For instance, a lower degree of delegation involves assigning a task to an employee to develop a solution proposal, which is then discussed and decided upon together with the manager. A higher degree of delegation corresponds to a “leading by objectives” approach, where only the desired result is explained, framework conditions are agreed upon, and the way of implementation is decided by the employee. However, it is not only the maturity of the employees that is decisive for successful delegation but also the talent and maturity of the manager. Delegating requires letting go and doing so in an appropriately consistent manner. Many leaders tend to micromanage intensively. Overcoming this, in the long run, is one of the essential prerequisites for successful delegation.
Feedback
The regular exchange of information is an elementary component of empowerment in self-organised structures. Binding deadlines should be just as firmly anchored as the self-image of spontaneous feedback when needed. Feedback is not one-way and should not be equated with control or reporting. Feedback within the context of delegated tasks should be characterised by the exchange of both sides, mutual expectations, assessments, opinions, and suggestions. The aim is also to foster a mutual understanding of expectations, requirements, or constraints. Successful feedback is characterised by the fact that it generates trust, increases transparency, and enables active expectation management.
Macromanagement
Macromanagement here refers to the work towards empowering the organisation. Empowerment only succeeds when the transfer of responsibility and autonomy is accompanied by adequate empowerment and equipment of the organisation. Instead of micromanagement, the attention of the leader or the management must be focused on providing or procuring the right resources (qualification, quality) in the required amount (quantity) and at the right time.
Self-organisation and autonomy do not mean chaos and anarchy! It is essential for every company to strike the right balance and implement a suitable form of organisation. The greater the freedom of decision-making in self-organised teams, the clearer the limits and thresholds for authority to be implemented. Although a large proportion of decisions are made autonomously in teams with a high level of empowerment, managers still bear the overall responsibility. In addition to a suitable organisational form, this requires particularly the necessary talent among managers and a corporate culture such as that described by Enterneering®.
