Don't Empower Your Staff Liberate Them!

Oren Harari is a writer, a business consultant formerly with the Tom Peters Group, and a professor of business at the University of San Francisco. He recently spoke with us on a subject about which he has some strong opinions: empowerment.

Empowerment is a buzzword that's been floating around management circles for several years, but you've criticized it frequently. What's wrong with empowerment?

There's a couple of problems with empowerment. The most obvious one is, people just don't do it. They talk a lot about it. They talk about giving other folks a teeny-weeny little bit more power--a little bit more discretionary decision-making authority, a teeny-weeny-weeny little bit more budget control, a tiny raising of the bar on performance expectations. It's really something that does not have much real impact.

What other problems do you have with empowerment?

Empowerment assumes that people are passive and weak, and it is the job of a manager to somehow inject them with this magic potion called power. Then their eyes will pop open, they'll spring up, they'll whistle while they work, and all good things will occur. I think there's a fundamental flaw in that.

What's the flaw?

People are incredibly powerful to begin with. They have computers, they contribute to community activities, they run budgets for their home, they raise their kids, they're often involved in entrepreneurial startups on the side, and somehow they do all that without a supervisor. Yet, when they come to work, they're immediately put into little boxes called job descriptions, with highly restrictive policies and procedures. Then some yo-yo says he's going to empower them. Empowerment assumes that the all-seeing, all-knowing boss is going to do something to employees that will somehow make them powerful. That's a con.

So what are managers supposed to do?

The issue is not to empower people; the issue is to liberate them. You should assume that people are strong and ask yourself, as a manager: What do I need to do? Do I need to break down barriers to information? Do I need to provide them with better technology? Do I need to give them better training and development? Do I need to eliminate certain levels of hierarchy that do nothing except delay and distort information? It may very well be that the best thing I can do is GET OUT OF THE WAY.

But don't many managers resist giving up their power?

Much of it has to do with managers feeling that they can't let go. They're thinking, "Wait a minute, my job as a manager means I've got to control people." The irony is that by doing all this you gain more power. If you've got more powerful people working for you, doing exceptional things and taking responsibility, guess what? You're more powerful. You're still the leader, but a different kind of one. Your leadership is not based on barking orders--it's based on your ability to mold a team.

Doesn't this new freedom also frighten some employees?

People very often are distrustful of management's motives. You may get a reaction like, "Wait a minute, this isn't what work is. Work is you telling me what to do and me doing it." Managers can't automatically expect that employees will do cartwheels with joy for this. On the other hand, if management does approach it sincerely, there will be a tremendous amount of receptivity; there are very few people now who say, "All I want to do is meaningless, highly constrained work to get a paycheck."

Can you share some examples of unsuccessful empowerment and successful liberation?

In one company I studied, management had made their numbers look good by downsizing, but they didn't get rid of the inefficient and unnecessary work. Management said, "You're empowered." But what they did was dump the inefficient work on top of the shell-shocked survivors, who now had to do double and triple duty. Another time, though, I visited a manager at a different company and noticed that her clerical assistants were calling up customers to ask how they liked the company's product. When I congratulated her on delegating that task to her staff, it turned out she had no idea they were doing it. She had discussed their common purpose and what they wanted to achieve, and she said, "I leave it to them to figure out how to best get from here to there." And then she said something that I recommend every manager paste on his or her bathroom mirror and repeat three times before going to work each day: "I know that whatever it is they're doing is exactly what I'd want them to be doing if I knew what they were doing." How's that for a statement of trust?

Mr. Harari is coauthor of Jumping the Curve: Innovation and Strategic Choice in an Age of Transition (Jossey-Bass, 1994).