While the previous chapter focused on the importance of developing people, this chapter focuses on the need to empower people after they are ready to assume responsibility. Today's workers want influence on decisions that affect the way their expertise is used. They want to be treated as "partners" rather than as employees, with information and opinion flowing up as well as down. In addition, leadership expectations for employees have increased significantly. At a minimum, every person is expected to lead herself or himself; most employees at some point are also expected to lead formal and informal teams and organization units.
Because we are working in a business environment with less and less hierarchy, leaders are "thought" leaders who must use knowledge to lead their teams. Global leaders must be willing to give leadership to the person with the most knowledge about the particular challenge or issue at hand. There must be an open environment to communicate and share information, which will stimulate creativity, increase knowledge, and create a team environment. Global leaders of the future must let go of control that is not necessary. The CEO of one of the world's largest global companies received feedback that he was too stubborn and opinionated. He learned that he needed to do a better job of empowering others to make decisions and to focus less on "being right" himself. For one year, he practiced a simple technique. He would take a breath before speaking and ask himself a question: "Is it worth it?" He learned that 50 percent of the time, his comments may have been correct, but they weren't worth it. He began to focus more on empowering others and letting them take ownership and commitment for decisions, and less upon his own need to add value.
After training employees to understand their tasks, roles, and functions within the company, empowering these individuals requires the leader to first give people opportunities and then let go of the process in which the job gets done.
Give people the space and opportunity to grow.... Trust your people and give them opportunities.[1]
However, a crucial point may be missed if the following concept is not grasped: It is not possible for a leader to "empower" someone to be accountable and make good decisions. People must empower themselves. The effective global leader can facilitate empowerment only by encouraging and supporting a decision-making environment in which people feel comfortable making decisions and by giving people the tools and knowledge they need to take action upon those decisions. In our work in executive coaching, we have done extensive "before and after" studies on the impact of coaching on the long-term behavioral change of the person being coached. The key variable in increased leadership effectiveness is the leader, not the coach. In the same way, managers must ensure that their teams are composed of individuals who are willing to take personal responsibility for the organization's success, and they must provide a favorable environment in which people are encouraged to grow.[2]
In other words, the leader must build confidence within the organization. By creating an environment within which employees feel they can make decisions and act upon their own initiative, the leader has helped them reach an empowered state. However, the leader didn't empower the person; he or she created an environment in which the employee feels strong enough to adopt the behavior of an empowered employee.
Create an environment where they get the chance to surprise themselves.[3]
Going about the process of empowering by building confidence in the organization takes longer, but it is effective. For instance, if a company has a history of shutting down or letting go of initiators, a leader can't just tell employees that they are empowered to make decisions. The global leader must first create a safe environment by encouraging constructive dialogue, asking for input, and sharing knowledge. However, it is counterproductive for executives to "announce" that employees are empowered. Employees will only believe they are empowered when they are left alone to accomplish results over a period of time.
Sometimes, leaders may need to restore confidence, and leaders should always maintain the positive and cut down on the negative.[4]
Part of this concept of building an empowering environment is highly dependent on the leader's ability to run interference on behalf of his or her team. They will need to let people know that they are safe at their job.[5] An ongoing discussion of needs, opportunities, tasks, obstacles, projects, what's working, and what's not working is crucial to the development and maintenance of a safe working environment. Therefore, the empowering global leader is likely to spend much of his or her time in dialogue with other leaders, employees, team members, and peers.
Encourage people to have their own dream, to think big—and support them.[6]
As the role of the global leader evolves into a new form in which the central task is developing other leaders committed to the company vision and actively helping followers reach their own potential, leaders must lose the mindset that they have the monopoly on good ideas within the organization.
Today there is too much hierarchy. We must work with the people and use their talents and potential.[7]
The fact is that in most cases the global leader of the future won't know enough to tell people what to do, and the leader who tries to know it all and to tell everyone what to do is doomed to failure. An example is the old AT&T system, where one executive joked, "We have procedures on how to do everything but go to the bathroom, and we have a taskforce assigned to study that." In today's new world of telecommunications, change occurs far too rapidly for leaders to depend upon top-down structure and direction. However, the leader who lets the staff have more chances to make decisions[8] strengthens the organization by (1) developing each individual's decision-making capabilities; (2) energizing people with responsibility and accountability; and (3) creating a team of competent individuals who can handle company and industry challenges more quickly and with greater success.
Leaders must be good at managing teams. They must foster learning; increase their knowledge base; be flexible and help the group to be flexible; empower people to make decisions; and give their workers information to make good decisions.[9]
As the need for creative and innovative experts—knowledge workers—increases in the organization, so does the need to allow each of these valuable individuals to lead when a challenge in his or her field of expertise is at hand. In order to do so, the traditional decision-making process that entails many layers of hierarchy must be devolved. Gifford Pinchot, co-author of Intrapreneuring in Action: A Handbook for Business Innovation, has helped many organizations move from a hierarchical model toward an intrapreneurial model to help them achieve new levels of innovations.
Our company is a highly decentralized model. But, it pays to have some sort of semblance of a centralized structure. This lends itself to the leveraging our strengths, ideas, information, etc. We will maintain high decentralization, especially in terms of local decision-making.[10]
The effective global leader will replace traditional hierarchical leadership with more subtle methods of leadership, including dialogue, influence, accountability, and responsibility, to create a team of people who work for the common good of the organization.
Leaders can be successful when they give power and credibility to those working under them. It is important for leaders to empower their employees and build expertise and trust in them. This way, there is not such a hierarchy. For example, at my company, we have a team of six groups who are currently working on a class-action lawsuit. I trust the leaders of these groups to work on their own without my constant supervision. I can coordinate activities between the groups and oversee the entire process without having to be involved in each group's actions every day. There is clear communication and reciprocal trust so that the goals are met.[11]
Knowledge workers have enormous (often untapped) ingenuity, intelligence, and talent that lays dormant if they do not also have a challenge, responsibility, and accountability.
Leaders must be able to disseminate information so that they can trust their subordinates to be more responsible and accountable. They must instill the corporate vision and execution approach in their employees. Communication is a big factor. We must send a clear message. They must be able to trust and empower their frontline people and hold them accountable.[12]
The effective global leader of the future will hire talented employees, teach them the core values and mission of the company, clearly identify goals and priorities, impart responsibilities and accountability, and then let go.
Effective executives are open to different ideas and don't manage how the job is done, which is style. Leaders should allow freedom for people to get the job done, as long as there isn't a negative effect on the company; results will be reached with people expressing their own style.[13]
Knowledge workers should have responsibility for their own contribution. Individuals should help decide accountability in terms of quality and quantity in respect to time and in respect to cost.
I want more freedom to do my thing. I have my way of achieving the goal, so don't tell me how to do it. I want to be involved in the decision-making process. I want leaders to take my input. I want to make my voice heard and be a more empowered part of the organization.[14]
Lastly, if people see opportunities for ownership and personal development, they are much more likely to stay with the organization. For example, companies can provide intrapreneurial opportunities. Gifford Pinchot (who coined the term intrapreneur) has shown how major corporations can provide opportunities for semiautonomous enterprises to operate within the larger corporate structure. By allowing high-potential leaders to "run a business" inside a larger business, corporations can gain commitment while simultaneously developing people.
Competency comes with experience. Leaders develop the capabilities of their people by pushing decision-making down to those who are closest to the customer or activity. In doing so, it's important to allow people to make mistakes and then to help them recover quickly.
Companies are going to be flatter. They will be getting decisions made at the lowest possible level in the organization. The less interference you have, the better.[15]
Because quick, informed decision making is imperative if a company is to compete in today's global and fast-paced marketplace, it is well worth risking a blunder or two. The effective global leader will put safety checks in place to guard from certain disasters and will maintain an open-door policy with employees to discuss current projects and challenges. McKinsey and Company is a benchmark organization for encouraging challenge inside the work team and simultaneously building support for the final team decision.
I think organizations will move to flatter structures which empower employees to make decisions as long as there are certain checkpoints. You have to limit risk to a certain degree.[16]
The foundation of empowering relationships between global leaders and their employees is trust.
They [global leaders] must have the "trust factor." We must trust that people are doing their jobs.[17]
Leaders who do not trust will micromanage the process in which people do their work, and they will probably keep many projects for themselves because they don't trust anyone else to do them right.
They must let go of details, but they still need to make sure that the organization is going in the right direction. Instead of the leaders giving out orders of how things should be done, they must now serve the organization under them.[18]
This not only stifles creative thinking, but it undermines workers' confidence. Any sense of autonomy is destroyed, and the leader is left with the bulk of the burden because employees will only do what they are told; they will not strive to improve. Frances Hesselbein, former CEO of the Girl Scouts of the United States, was a role model for encouraging achievement and not hoarding power. She created an environment in which the person in the mailroom defined himself as the heart of the organization who was responsible for communications in and out as opposed to defining himself as a person who took orders and did mundane work.
Effective global leaders should be able to paint a picture of where the company is headed, what roles people will play, and what goals must be accomplished, and also able to inspire and motivate others to work toward that point in a way that embodies excellence. In a rapidly changing future, executives will need to learn not only to let go but they will need to learn to let go quickly. One executive who was listed as an excellent future leader consistently told his people, "Get back to me when you need or want help; otherwise, I'm going to assume that you are getting the job done."
By looking closely at personalities and experiences, one can evaluate how a given individual can lead best and in what context that leadership will likely be successful. A crucial factor in such an evaluation is the individual's motivation: As an example, an interesting comparison is between personalities who are more achievement-motivated and those who are more power-motivated.
These executives are able to identify who the leaders are. Then they can empower those leaders. They find "the best to help the rest." They understand different styles and know when to accept the difference. These leaders can identify someone's strengths and weaknesses and find workers who complement each other.[19]
Achievement-motivated people are logical and organized; they complete assigned tasks well; they raise standards. High achievers want predictability, order, improvement, and they are diligent about technique and process. They are skilled at showing others what needs to be done and how it should be done to meet different goals successfully. However, they are uncomfortable with the lack of control they feel when they hand projects off; therefore, they are not as likely to be successful high-level leaders.
The concept of power often gets a bad reputation, but it is actually the process of influencing and having impact on whole constituencies of people. Power-motivated people inspire others to do tasks well; they create coalitions for change; they have the capacity to see the big picture and link individuals and constituencies with it. However, in many cases their capacity to carry out detailed work themselves may be limited; they prefer instead to influence others to carry out these detailed tasks, but now with more confidence that they will be in service of the "greater good" rather than of a largely individual agenda.
Every individual has a different mixture of achievement, affiliation, power, and autonomy drivers. Successful leaders recognize how these particular drivers can be deployed for best effect; they also recognize the accompanying limitations of the motivational "jigsaw" and accordingly plan for the partnering of executives with complementary strengths. Gaining insight into these motivators can be an extremely useful tool in determining what style of leadership a person will have and if he or she will be an effective leader within a specific business context.
Trusted, responsible, knowledgeable—empowered—workers are the foundation upon which successful companies are based. However, only if employees feel that their abilities and contributions are fully valued will they share their ideas and expertise. Company bureaucracy, excessive meetings, and micromanaging leaders undermine workers' sense of autonomy and professionalism. A more effective leader will define roles, goals, schedules, and requirements, and then delegate specific projects to teams of individuals.
The role of the global leader is to create an environment within which people feel confident making decisions, taking responsibility, and sharing ideas and knowledge, and then give them the space and freedom they need to do their jobs well. This is especially important in today's environment, in which the workforce is often so physically scattered that leaders can't be operationally involved in each task. As such, they must let go of the details and put their efforts into guiding the course of the organization.
1. Healthcare, Australia, 34.
2. Technology, South Korea, 36.
3. Products and services, Switzerland, 45.
4. Transportation, Canada, 47.
5. Healthcare, Taiwan, 41.
6. Technology, Taiwan, 32.
7. Products and services, Brazil, 49.
8. Technology, Taiwan, 32.
9. Products and services, Brazil, 34.
10. Healthcare, Philippines, 36.
11. Investments, United States, 27.
12. Products and services, United States, 33.
13. Transportation, United States, 40.
14. Products and services, United States, 27.
15. Products and services, Switzerland, 45.
16. Pharmaceutical, United States, 31.
17. Government, Canada, 34.
18. Investments, United States, 27.
19. Telecommunications, United States, 35.
20. Information and quotes from interview with Marjorie Dorr conducted by Cathy Greenberg. April 2001.