The Biggest Killer of Empowerment (and 3 Ways to Fix It)

Episode #374 The Biggest Killer of Empowerment (and 3 Ways to Fix It)

ARE WE “DUMBING DOWN” EMPOWERMENT?

Empowerment is a word that seems to be used in an increasingly offhanded and throwaway fashion. When that happens, it loses both its meaning and its power.

In many ways, it reminds me of strategy: The word is simple and universally recognised; every leader talks about it; many bandy it around frequently, because they think it’s going to make them seem smarter.

Some people even insist on having the word “strategic” in their job title (e.g. Strategic Accounts Managers).

And still, every person has a completely different understanding of what strategy actually means.

But this topic is about empowerment, and despite the dumbing down of empowerment, it’s still one of the most critical ingredients of execution.

If you can’t empower your people effectively, you’ll stymie them. They’ll never willingly accept the level of accountability that would supercharge their results, if only they knew how to embrace it.

In this newsletter, I uncover some of the nuances of empowerment which, even though you might not be aware of them, are probably holding your people back and diminishing your own effectiveness.

I learned these principles over many years of trial, error, and frustrating results. But when I finally worked it out, my people became unstoppable.

I kick off with a look at why empowerment is so important; I go into a little more detail by revealing the number one empowerment killer; and I finish by giving you my three pro tips to safeguard you from disempowering your people.

WHAT IS EMPOWERMENT, REALLY?

When you ask any leader what empowerment means to them, one of the most common answers is: “Hire good people and get out of their way.”

Okay, fair enough. It’s not a bad start… but it isn’t particularly helpful when everything doesn’t work out swimmingly.

Empowerment, when it’s done well, is an extremely active process. If you’re not thinking about it all the time and shaping the culture around high levels of empowerment, it’s likely you’ll be getting less than stellar results.

In the very early days of No Bullsh!t Leadership, we produced Ep.27: Unleashing the Power of Your People. This was one of the foundational episodes designed to explain the most critical principles of No Bullsh!t Leadership.

If you’ve only recently found the podcast, I would really encourage you to go back to the start and listen to those first two dozen, or maybe 30 episodes where we build up these foundations. If you do that, everything else is going to make much more sense because you’ll have a better understanding of where I’m coming from.

Unleashing the Power of Your People is all about empowerment. And, as I said in the introduction, empowerment is easy to say, but it’s much harder to do.

To bring you up to speed on the basics, I want to quickly recap the principles of accountability and empowerment.

Execution excellence is about getting things done, and this is driven by two highly correlated factors: accountability and empowerment – the yin and yang of execution.

For your people, this requires clarity of purpose, certainty of ownership and confidence in their basic autonomy.

But for you, this is how you identify and implement single point accountability. You need one head to pat and one ass to kick (and they both have to belong to the same person).

Many organisations lack a strong accountability culture. And the way the culture operates, they’re more likely to neutralise their people than they are to empower them.

How do you recognise a culture with weak accountability? There are some very obvious (if not a little worrying) characteristics.

The most obvious clues can be seen in the way decisions are made:

• In an attempt to appease everyone, decisions are made by consensus;
• To do this, there’s a process of management by committee – lots of meetings, but very few tangible outcomes;
• The more experienced people and opinion leaders use their power of veto, but they don’t take any responsibility for the delays that this causes;
• Everyone has to have their views considered and incorporated in the eventual decision or solution;
• It’s really hard to work out who actually makes the final decision; and
• Every decision just floats up high enough that someone eventually accepts the recommendations they receive.

Decisions are normally cobbled together by some sort of committee. But the person who signs off doesn’t really own it either: they’re too far away from the action to really know whether it’s good, bad, or indifferent.

They’re effectively exercising their authority rather than their judgment.

The result for the team is an all-care-no-responsibility culture.

The result for the business is an institutionalised helplessness: the inability to respond to changing markets and environments.

That might sound familiar… and if you think it sounds bad, well, that’s because it is.

THE NINE ELEMENTS OF EMPOWERMENT

We know that empowerment and accountability have to travel hand in hand: they’re two sides of the same coin and, given how important they are for execution, it’s worth trying to understand that relationship a little more deeply.

If you want to review the principles of single-point accountability, the best episode is probably the one we produced recently, Ep.365: Why Your Team Keeps Falling Short (the accountability gap).

Before we dig deep, I’m going to briefly run through the nine vital ingredients of empowerment. And, as a bonus, I’m going to identify the most common mistake that leaders seem to make when it comes to each element.

1. Context. People are more empowered when they understand the context. In fact, the holy grail of leadership is to connect the organisation’s purpose, vision, and strategy to each person’s role so that they can see how they fit into the big picture.

So, what’s the most common mistake that most leaders make?

They give people information on a need-to-know basis only… “Just do what I’ve asked and don’t worry about the other stuff.”

2. Goal clarity. Make it really clear what good looks like. The more clarity people have on the object of the exercise, the more likely they are to deliver what you want.

So, what’s the most common mistake that most leaders make?

They outline their expectations once or twice, thinking that’s enough. They fail to realise that you have to constantly reiterate, reinforce, and restate your expectations.

3. Clear the decks. Don’t overload your people with work or they won’t be able to focus on what’s truly important. Everything’s going to get done half-assed.

So, what’s the most common mistake that most leaders make?

They give people too much work, and then they keep piling stuff on without adjusting their original expectations or targets.

4. Resource appropriately. Unrealistic resourcing is another root cause of disempowerment. Without adequate resources, your people are going to be forced to dip down and to make critical compromises; they’ll be drawn into the urgent, not the important.

So, what’s the most common mistake that most leaders make?

They don’t give their people enough of the right resources to deliver the required outcomes; it’s that simple.

5. Delegate decisions to the lowest possible level. This is a key one, so I’m going to save it to deal with shortly. Suffice to say at this point, decisions should be made at the lowest practical point in your team.

So, what’s the most common mistake that most leaders make?

They allow decisions to drift upwards so that they’re made one, two, or even three levels above where they should be being made.

6. Be available. Apart from establishing a really good cadence for one-on-one meetings, it’s important to be accessible to your team. You don’t want your own work to be disrupted every five minutes, but people need to know that you are happy to have them book a short informal meeting to discuss the things that are holding them back.

So, what’s the most common mistake that most leaders make?

Saying they have an open door policy, but never actually being there; The door is only open because there’s no one around.

7. Checkpoints and reviews. In the one-on-one cadence I just mentioned, it’s really important to look at work in progress, understand where your people are at, and identify any issues before they snowball out of control. This also supports #2 (goal clarity).

So, what’s the most common mistake that most leaders make?

They don’t inspect progress at frequent enough intervals. By the time they do, it’s often too late.

8. Challenge, coach, confront. This is the framework that keeps your people focused and clear. If you want to take a deeper dive on this, check out Ep.57: Challenge, Coach, Confront.

So, what’s the most common mistake that most leaders make?

They simply don’t commit to giving structured feedback regularly. Your people want to know three things when they come into work each day:

1. What are your expectations of me?
2. How am I performing against those expectations? and
3. What does my future hold?

The challenge, coach, confront framework is the mechanism for making that clear.

9. Provide air cover. This is simply about protecting your people from the politics, irrationality, and bullsh!t that often flows down from above. It’s also about having their backs when they make a mistake in good faith.

So, what’s the most common mistake that most leaders make?

Because they can’t say no to their boss, the work from above flows through unchallenged, causing disruption, distraction, and a lack of focus.

If you fall into these traps, don’t worry… I have too. But I eventually learned from my mistakes. Just look at it like an upside opportunity: getting this right is going to lead you and your team to break through performance.

THE #1 EMPOWERMENT KILLER

 When it comes to the nine big empowerment enablers, a lot of leaders are pretty reasonable at many of those things. The one that I find most problematic though is decision making.

If people aren’t given the freedom and space to make their own decisions, how can they be held accountable for the outcomes they’ve been asked to deliver?!

Keeping decision rights rock solid and in the hands of the accountable decision maker is a not negotiable if you want to build a strong culture of accountability and empowerment.

The easiest way to stymie accountability (and therefore, performance) is to allow a poor decision-making culture to flourish. I’ve already mentioned a few of these dynamics, but I want to go a bit deeper.

There are four key dynamics you have to manage when it comes to decision making:

1. Decisions should be made as close to the action as possible.

As I said, decisions tend to float upwards. You have to try to find the right decision point – the sweet spot, if you like. That spot’s going to sit between two levels:

• At the lower level, you’ve got the place where the expertise is greatest: the person closest to the problem.
• At the higher level, you’ve got more competent and mature decision makers who have more authority to act.

Normally, the right decision point is at least one level lower in your team than you might initially think.

2. People have a natural desire to have input into a decision.

Everyone’s got an opinion… but not everyone has the expertise, the proximity, and the judgment to make that opinion worthy of consideration. And very few will take any accountability for the eventual outcome of that decision.

But, of course, in your desire to please everyone, your tendency is going to be to allow many more people to get involved than should actually be involved.

When you do this, it renders the accountable decision maker rather impotent. They lose the empowerment to make the decision, as everyone else asserts their right to be heard.

This is a slippery slope, and it pushes the focus of the decision making process to keeping people happy, rather than coming up with the best solution.

3. People don’t want to be exposed.

Your people are going to love getting your buy-in to their decisions.

I want you to just pause here for a minute and reflect on how often you have to agree with people’s decisions when they bring them to you for endorsement.

These decisions should be made below you, but you probably find yourself buying in to almost every decision in your team. If you weigh into your people’s decisions, you start to assume some of their accountability.

People who don’t want to take on accountability love this: “If this all goes to Custard, Marty’s right in it with me because he agreed with all my critical decisions, I’m going to be fine.”

4. You will have a tendency to want to keep control.

One of the great paradoxes of leadership is that the higher up you go, the less direct control you have, but the more accountability you have to assume. 

This is one of the core principles of transitioning to more senior levels of leadership. You can’t do it all yourself. You have to trust the other leaders below you to get the job done. All you can do is to establish the right capability, standards, and talent to do the job to a high level, so that you are not exposed. 

But despite your intellectual commitment to this principle, you’re still going to have this irresistible urge to make sure every decision made below you is a good one.

THREE PRO TIPS FOR PRESERVING EMPOWERMENT

Just to restate the object of the exercise here:

• Great execution comes when you have strong single point accountability;
• People won’t embrace accountability unless they feel empowered;
• They need to feel as though they have control and autonomy in their work;
• You want your people to be constantly developing;
• You want them to grow in confidence and capability; and
• You want them to keep building on their judgment and experience.

Once you give them a taste of empowerment, you want to get people to the point where they seek even greater empowerment. After that, it’s way easier to give them stronger levels of accountability, and then, execution and performance will predictably improve.

The one thing that kills empowerment faster than anything else is trampling over your people’s decision rights. So, let me give you my three pro tips to stop you from disempowering your people:

1. Help your people… but not too much.

Whenever someone comes to you for help with a problem, make sure you don’t give them the answer. Instead, try using these seven words: “I don’t know… what do you think?”

You want your people thinking for themselves and coming up with their own answers. If you do this, you’ll learn a lot about their capability, and they’ll get the opportunity to take some calculated risks.

Obviously you can’t just sit back silently while they drive the car off the cliff… but you can give them the space to reach the conclusion themselves without just giving them the answer.

2. Be aware of the subtext.

I was terrible with the subtext. One of my direct reports would lay out a problem and a few potential solutions, and then they’d ask me what they should do.

Quite often I’d say something like,

“This is completely your call, so I’m not going to tell you what to do. You need to make this decision yourself. But… if I were you, I’d be thinking about [this]… and I think you may have overlooked [this]… and, by the way, the solution would benefit by adding [this]… but don’t worry, it’s completely your call. You need to do what you think is best.“

I had just inadvertently told them exactly what decision to make. I diluted their empowerment and I’d take on a bunch of the accountability that they should be holding.

3. Keep up the pace.

You need to maintain a strong sense of urgency. Speed underpins empowerment.

If you set a quick tempo, people don’t have the time to faff around in endless meetings; they don’t have time to consult with everyone who has an opinion; they’re not willing to wait for a 2-week turnaround for everyone on an email list to get their comments back.

If you put pressure on your people for speed of delivery and coach them through that process, they’re going to feel empowered enough to say no to those who want to assert their right to contribute… in an accountability-free zone.

THE GATEWAY DRUG TO EXECUTION EXCELLENCE

Empowerment and accountability have to be built into your culture… and you are the only one who can do that.

Telling your team they’re empowered does nothing. People watch your feet, not your lips: they want to know what happens when they embrace empowerment and someone gets their nose out of joint because they didn’t “feel heard”… they want to know what happens if they make their own decision and it goes pear-shaped… they want to know if you are really going to give them air cover when the boss cracks it.

This is why you need to get really good at giving your people the autonomy they need to do their jobs. After all, empowerment is the gateway drug to execution excellence.