People Power
Author: KEN SHELTON

Effective leaders are concerned with the why and how of getting power and responsibility dispersed through the organization.

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The hullabaloo over employee empowerment is no longer confined to the "elephants" learning to dance--everyone is getting into the act. And for good reason: empowerment is high on the list of needs to survive and succeed in the 1990s.

Why are so many executives at least paying lip service to empowerment? Is it the crazed quest for quality? The fashionable harangue against hierarchy? The open admission that organizations of every size and type must now reinvent themselves and more fully tap the potential of people? It's all of that and more. But the driving factors appear to be the following three:

1. Competition. As foreign and domestic competitors become flatter, faster, and more flexible, many Fortune 500 corporations are shedding management layers and adopting empowerment as a creed. In his analysis of effective performance, Bill Byham, CEO of Development Dimensions International, has added two new factors, teamwork and empowerment: "As organizations adapt to worldwide competition, the dimensions related to job success and failure change. In flatter organizations, individuals and groups must be empowered to make more decisions. You can't be an effective leader without empowering subordinates. Empowered employees are more likely to search for ways to improve quality, productivity and service and to engage in self-improvement since they are proud of their job and identify with its success."

2. Changing nature of work. More work today is knowledge-based, requiring people to acquire and use information and knowledge to create products or to help customers improve their business performance. Apple's John Sculley says that the new generation of leaders must be more intellectually aware because "the world is changing, becoming more idea and information-intensive; the people who will rise to the top will be people who are comfortable with and excited by ideas and information."

3. Shifting employee expectations. "Organizations must rely on the personal leadership of individuals at every level if they are to manage change effectively and sustain competitive advantage," says John W. Humphrey, CEO of The Forum Corporation in Boston. "To create broad and deep leadership, you need a high degree of alignment (clear direction, shared vision and well-defined policies, procedures, and systems) and empowerment in support of the corporate strategy. Empowerment suggests a strong feeling of authority and ownership that motivates employees to take initiative, responsibilities, and risks. "With high alignment and empowerment, people feel they have an ownership stake in the success of the business."

Roots of Empowerment

"Empowerment," notes Rosabeth Moss Kanter, editor of the Harvard Business Review, "is giving people access to three key power tools: information, support, and resources." Companies that excel in empowerment "make more information available to more people at more levels through more devices; permit collaboration so that people can build supportive problem-solving coalitions; and decentralize resources to make them more available for local problem solving."

Even though this is elementary, Empowerment 101, it is still counter-intuitive for many control-centered or power-based managers. "That's why any manager who hopes to empower his people must be principle-centered," says Stephen R. Covey, chairman of the Covey Leadership Center and author of Principle-Centered Leadership and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

The taproot of empowerment is trust, says Covey. "If you have no or low trust in the culture, if management lacks character or competence, then you have to control people and measure their performance. But if you have high trust, people will supervise themselves and evaluate their performance on the basis of win-win performance agreements. You then become a source of help to them."

Bill Byham of DDI says that empowerment means "creating a sense of ownership of job by providing clear expectations, control of resources, responsibility and coaching--offering help without removing responsibility. It's guided discovery in that the supervisor helps subordinates retain ownership of a problem or idea while they work out a solution together."

Why Empower People?

Among the many benefits (fruits) that grow from the roots of empowerment are the following six.

?Commitment. "The primary challenge of leadership in the 1990s," say John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene, coauthors of Megatrends 2000, "is to encourage people to work effectively in teams and to be more entrepreneurial, self-managing, autonomous. The dominant principle has shifted from management in order to control, to leadership in order to bring out the best in people and to respond quickly to change. While capital and technology are important resources, people make or break a company. To harness their power, leaders inspire commitment by sharing authority, thus enabling their firms to attract, reward, and motivate the best people."

?Quality products and services. The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award won't be won without empowering both employees and customers, says its director, Curt Reimann. "The leaders of the past delegated or relegated quality and its internal standards to a department within the company. The new manager must have a different focus: quality driven externally by customer requirements." Every employee must be empowered to deal effectively with internal and external customers. When John Grettenberger, General Manager of Cadillac, winner of the 1991 Baldrige Award, was asked, "How do you prepare 10,000 people for a Baldrige examination," he replied, "You can't. People either accept ownership for the process or they don't."

?Speed and responsiveness. "Many companies are working on the symptoms instead of the root causes of non-competitiveness," says Philip R. Thomas, CEO of The Thomas Group and an expert in speed and responsiveness. "They are trying to improve forecasts instead of reducing cycle time so they won't have to forecast so far in the future. They are trying to control customer changes instead of reducing cycle time so that they are responding to the changes on a real-time basis. They are trying to manipulate work-in-process to meet a given need instead of removing barriers that reduce cycle time and improve process predictability."

When these efforts fail, says Thomas, "executives of these ill-fated companies apply excess resources in the form of people, inventories, equipment, and risk in a vain attempt to improve cost, quality, and customer service. Excess resources only compound problems. To solve quality and competitiveness problems, create a short-cycle-time, rapid-feedback culture."

?Synergy. Synergy results from valuing differences, from bringing different perspectives together in a spirit of mutual respect, says Stephen R. Covey. "Mature people view differences as potential strengths. They not only respect those with different views, they actively seek them out. They also seek objective feedback from both internal and external sources on their performance, products, and services and look for ways to build complementary teams where the strength of one compensates for the weakness of another." At 3M, for example, managers act like "sponsors" who express a strategic vision and then let people with different ideas and styles find creative ways to contribute.

?Human resource development. What W. Edwards Deming first taught the Japanese forty years ago were people empowerment principles, not product quality practices. His fourteen points constitute basic human development principles, and his "deadly diseases" are descriptions of anti-empowerment crimes committed by well-intentioned management. "The wealth of a nation (or company)," says Deming, "depends on its people, management, and leadership more than on its natural resources. All must adopt a new (empowering) style of management and acknowledge that the aim of leadership is to help people and machines do a better job."

?Management leverage. "Amateur managers try to direct the efforts of subordinates by attempting to think out everything for them," says Bill Oncken III of the William Oncken Corporation. The result? "One-to-one leverage and a back-breaking assortment of monkeys. The amateur never gets over the feeling that to stay away is to move in the opposite direction from where he or she should be moving. Knowing when to stay away is the mark of a pro, whose leverage is much greater than the number of subordinates because of the number of self-assignments each empowered individual takes on and completes without the manager even knowing about it."

Where is Empowerment Working?

Several organizations are putting the principles of empowerment into practice for their great gain.

?FPL. "Anyone interested in a career at Florida Power and Light participates on quality teams," says Lorraine Dusky, who wrote about FPL's amazing transformation from a beleaguered utility to the surprise winner of the Deming Prize. "Some employees resented the new emphasis and the extra demands and left the company, but those who stayed worked sixteen-hour days, volunteered for extra duty, and proved something to themselves and this country." AT FPL, middle managers became "facilitators," who coaxed team members to look for problems to solve and go after them. "To be effective, these quality leaders would have to see each employee with new eyes, to assume that every worker was an intelligent individual who genuinely wanted to give his or her best to the company."

?Federal Express. To CEO Fred Smith, empowerment means that employees don't just work for Federal Express--they are Federal Express: "Daily, they go above and beyond to serve our customers. They are the ones who trek through all kinds of weather; deliver every package, each one critical; they persist in solving every customer's problem; they ferret out the root cause of every problem to prevent it from ever happening again. Their talent, ingenuity, and commitment drive our quality standards closer to our goal of 100 percent customer satisfaction."

In a service company, says Smith, "each interaction with a customer can be priceless or disastrous. Customer satisfaction begins with employee satisfaction. If we put our employees first, they will deliver impeccable service, and profit will be the natural outcome."

?SAS. Jan Carlzon built Scandinavian Airline Systems (SAS) on the belief that the leader who expects results must first give people free access to information. "An employee without the information can't take responsibility. With information, he cannot avoid taking it." Carlzon grants broad responsibilities to workers on all levels. "Managers," he says," are there to support the mass of employees on the front lines of customer service."

SAS employees understand that an airline can develop intense brand loyalty when workers deal swiftly and competently with passenger demands at key points (moments of truth) during a trip. At SAS, a clerk can switch a ticket or give vouchers to disgruntled passengers without red tape; flight attendants can give a free drink after a delay without bureaucratic wrangling. All employees keep hunting for ways to add value to in-flight service and to improve life for passengers on the ground.

Seven Characteristics

Empowered organizations share the following characteristics:

1. They break down barriers. Edwards Deming says that the artificial barriers between people and departments must come down, along with all else in the systems that creates adversarial relationships among people who need to cooperate.

2. They create and manage a compelling vision. Warren Bennis says that great leaders and followers create a compelling vision and then manage the dream by communicating, recruiting, rewarding, retraining, and reorganizing.

3. People at all levels are champions of the vision. James Belasco says that people will be more threatened than excited about a new vision "unless there are empowered change agents who champion the vision at every level, bringing it down to the gut level of each person by showing them how the vision will help them solve the biggest job-related problem confronting them."

4. Everybody feels that they are a legitimate part of what is going on. Stanford professor Steven Brandt says: The magic, the zest that produces ideas and then converts them into quality products and services comes from being a legitimate part of what is going on. All members pull their individual oars because they know that if they don't, the boat won't move. People exhibit immense creativity and motivated behavior without being prodded if they are getting growth-enhancing feedback and soul satisfaction from what they are doing.

5. They try to bust the bureaucracy. Harvard professor Richard Cavanagh says that successful companies fight bureaucracy aggressively on every front--preventing it when they can, attacking it when they find that it has crept in. The winning performers are obsessively dedicated to keeping their systems and structures simple. They find that doing so is far easier and more fruitful than trying to cope with cumbersome reporting arrangements and layers of delegation.

6. They learn and teach the art of self-leadership. Charles Manz, author of the Art of Self-Leadership, says that empowerment efforts often fail and people fall far short of the dreams and goals they set because of short-comings in self-leadership. "To enhance self-leadership," he says, "build more naturally rewarding features into your activities and focus your thoughts on the naturally rewarding aspects of your work."

7. They replace fear with feedback, order giving with decision making. Intensive self-examination and feedback make for better people and products, notes John Grettenberger. One way we secure this feedback is through our assemblers, the people who actually build our cars. These talented people study prototype models, surface problems and make suggestions and decisions to correct or eliminate them. People aren't afraid any more to tell any member of our team what is right or what isn't.

"Today," says John Naisbitt, "we are replacing the manager as order giver with the manager as teacher, facilitator, and coach. Facilitators draw out answers from those who know them best--the people who do the job. Facilitators ask questions, guide a group to consensus, and use information to motivate action."

Effective empowerment efforts result in more co-mission, co-ordination, co-operation. As the interests and activities of individuals are more closely aligned with those of organizations, people act more as responsible agents who are empowered at their level to make decisions. "We all need the power to do and to be," says Stephen R. Covey, "because when we lose our agency, we abdicate our power to act and become things to be acted upon.

"We may actually disempower people who are competent," says Covey, "if all the systems say, 'We really don't trust you that much.' Until we give people the keys and say, 'You alone decide,' we won't get empowerment."

Empowerment grows from the roots of trust, character and competence--and without the roots, we simply won't get the fruits, season after season.

Ken Shelton, editor of Executive Excellence and Utah Business, is the author of Empowering Business Resources and a new book, Counterfeit Leadership, (801) 375-4060.








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December 1991
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