Who Gets to Decide What?

In this chapter, we focus on the following aspect of empowerment: giving employees the authority to make decisions and take action without first getting approval. Empowerment is always a matter of degree. Every employee is empowered to make some decisions without seeking approval.

Additional benefits include improved customer service and satisfaction, increased flexibility, accelerated process improvement, and improved ability to respond to unanticipated events.

In terms of the impact on engagement and retention, the importance of empowering people cannot be over-emphasized. Empowerment contributes to psychological ownership of one's job. So why would managers not strive to give people as much empowerment as possible? Many of the reasons may sound different on the surface:

1. Managers do not want to give up control because they are accountable for the results.
2. They do not trust their employees' judgment, or they do not believe the employees have the necessary knowledge, experience, or information to make the decision.
3. They are concerned that the employees will commit malfeasance.

Though they sound different, all of those reasons boil down to one fundamental issue: lack of trust.

I wish I could remember where I picked up the following insight, but I just love it.

“In any hierarchical organization, incompetence seems to start just below wherever I am on the organization chart.”

People almost never say it so blatantly, but that is a very common attitude. Many managers feel they need to control as much as they can because they do not fully trust “those people down there.”

“But,” you say, “I don't want to control everything, I just want sign off on it so I know what's going on.” That is a copout. You can know what is going on if you are informed after the fact. The requirement to sign off before implementation exists so you can maintain the power to veto it. Here is a story to illustrate this from a seminar participant named Charlie:

What value did the signatures add? Maybe there is a need to have more than one signature to prevent collusion (lack of trust, again, by the way). But four signatures? How do you think Charlie felt? Like a trusted, respected staff member or more like a peon whose judgment and ethics could not be trusted? Charlie's story demonstrates that all the people whose signatures he needed saw Charlie as trustworthy. They accepted his order without questioning it. But the process they had created added no value, did not accomplish its purported purpose, and wasted productive time.

You might advance all kinds of good reasons for all those signatures, but be clear and honest about the impact of this process on engagement and retention. And don't kid yourself about the culture such a process creates.

You might say that it is not a matter of trust, and you might give him all the business reasons you want about why this must be the process, but without a doubt the message Bruce hears is, “We do not trust you to make a $25 decision.” Bruce hears this message because, despite all the spin you might apply, the fundamental reason is lack of trust.

That policy diminished the sales reps' job satisfaction, engagement, and motivation. We had it changed, by the way, after we computed that the policy cost the hotel more than 600 hours of productive selling time per year for the whole department, because of the time required to get the necessary signatures.

The previous stories have focused on what happens (and how it feels) when you disempower people. Here is an example of what can happen when you truly empower people. Among other things, this story illustrates the dramatic shift in attitude, performance, and culture when you do give people the authority to make important decisions.

You may be thinking, “That simply can't be true. Nobody would do that. Larry is exaggerating.” But it's true. We did that, and I'm not exaggerating. The process was remarkably effective.

I am not telling the story to persuade you to try this. I am telling the story to help you understand the striking change in attitude and performance that occurred as a result of this level of empowerment. Compare the traditional approach to the empowered approach.

Here is the former, more traditional situation. You and I work in department X. We have a very demanding, busy week coming up and our team is short two hourly employees. Human resources and the department manager are accountable to fill these jobs, but they have not done so. Because they did not do their jobs, we are going to have to do extra work this coming week, while the company saves the expense of the two employees. The job satisfaction on our team is not enhanced by this situation because we are smart enough to know that the manager will look better because of the reduced payroll costs. The motivational speech the manager gives about producing excellence under adversity rings a little hollow.

Maybe the manager is worried about getting through the week short-staffed, so he or she compromises the hiring standards and hires two warm bodies. Now we are stuck having to work with these unsatisfactory performers—and not just for this week, either. Our manager did this to us. This does not enhance our engagement or our job satisfaction. It does not contribute to our retention.

Does any of this sound familiar to you? Have you seen this movie before?

Now, contrast the traditional approach with what happens when the employees are empowered to make their own hiring decisions. Our hourly interviewers have been interviewing but they have not found anybody good enough to join our team. They say to the rest us, “Look, we could hire a couple of the people we've interviewed but we honestly do not think they're good enough for our team.” Our team then decides to get through the week short-staffed, but it is our decision. Our attitude about the week is entirely different. We motivate each other to produce excellence. Our relationships are deepened as we live out our decision to face this adversity together.

Or we choose the alternative. We hire a couple of warm bodies, fully conscious that we are compromising to get through the week. We are still stuck with these people after the week is over. But we have nobody to blame but ourselves. It is not management's fault. And we know we can make a different decision the next time this situation occurs.

Here is an important side note to this story. As it happens, the Talent Plus structured interview returns a score for each candidate. This score indicates the candidate's overall aptitude to perform the job with excellence. The higher the score, the more talented the candidate. Because management had been using the same interview to evaluate candidates, we decided to compare the scores of the people hired by the managers to the scores of the people hired by the hourly employees. The employees had higher standards than the managers. They had to work shoulder to shoulder with these people every day. They did not want the hassles of working with unsatisfactory performers.

Workers who decide how to get their work done (empowerment) enjoy a high degree of engagement. In the best cases, this includes deciding how to redesign processes and procedures.

People are full of suggestions; they have plenty of ideas. Tragically, many companies and cultures systematically demotivate people from giving suggestions.

A very common situation occurs when an employee makes a suggestion to his or her manager to change one of their processes. It is not unusual for a manager to listen to the suggestion and reply, “I can understand why you might think that would work, but I have 15 years of experience in this, and I've tried that before twice. It doesn't work.” Sound familiar? They do not try the suggestion. Nobody learns anything.

And how motivated do you think that employee is to submit the next suggestion?

Consider a team of empowered employees who have the authority to redesign how they get their work done. In this scenario, the employee team has 51 percent of the vote about their processes. Now they come to the manager with the same suggestion. But now they are seeking advice rather than approval. The manager gives the same response: “I can understand why you might think that would work, but I have 15 years of experience in this, and I've tried that before twice. It doesn't work.” But the employees are not persuaded. They are empowered to decide, and they do decide to try the new approach.

If it works, both the manager and the employees have learned something. If it does not work, the employees have learned that the manager's advice is worth more consideration than they gave it. They might well give the manager's advice more weight in the future.

Furthermore, if a suggestion works, the employees experience the kind of self-actualization that is usually available only to managers. They get to come to work every day and say to themselves, “I did that. I created that success.” And it is their success. They will be highly motivated to create the next improvement. In fact, in those situations, the manager can dial up this motivation by setting the right expectation, in the right way for future decisions, “Wow! You people are terrific. I can't wait to see what you do next!”

You may be asking, “But what do you do if it does not work? Yes, they have learned something, but now you have a bad process. If they have 51 percent of the vote, what do you do?”

That is a terrific question. The short answer is: Change it. Isn't this what you should do when a manager tries a new process that does not work?

Empowerment works in your favor here, too. When the empowered employees have tried a new process (their process) that does not work, they will often decide to change it, even before the manager has the opportunity to discuss it with them. Who wants ineffective processes? Certainly not the people who have to use them. This is what people will do in a culture that fosters empowerment and psychological ownership.

This discussion provides another powerful illustration of the difference in attitude and performance when you give people more power. By contrast, think about a less empowered model. A manager decides to change a process. He or she gets some input from the employees, but, ultimately, the manager redesigns the process. He or she explains why to the employees and trains them on the new process. As in the preceding discussion, either it works or it does not work.

If it works, everybody is better off and they appreciate it. Learning occurs for everyone. But the self-actualization belongs to the manager. The employees have no psychological ownership. This is not bad. But it could be better.

The most important difference is observed when it does not work. When it does not work, does the manager immediately change the process? Not a chance. The manager says, “I know this will work. The root cause of the problem is that the employees are not committed. They're not executing the process the way they're supposed to.”

The next thing you know, the manager is retraining everyone and reexplaining why this new process will make things better. What do the employees hear? “It's your fault this is not working.” They hear that because they're smart and they know that is the real message, however it might be worded. This is hurting their engagement, their motivation, and their likelihood of retention.

When a manager decides to try something new, in the vast majority of cases, he or she will require people to keep trying for a much longer period of time than when the employees own the decision.

As you can plainly see, in this discussion about empowerment we are talking not merely about allowing people to give their input about decisions; we are talking about a genuine transfer of power. This transfer can be scary because you cannot divest yourself of accountability. As a result, many managers take the position, “If I'm accountable, I need to make the decisions.” We understand that point of view. Many managers are not interested in taking the risks associated with a high degree of empowerment.

Implementing this approach requires a great deal of respect and trust in employees at every level: respect for their intelligence and trust in their motives. It requires you as the manager to acknowledge that you do not know everything, and that people with less education and less experience might well have a better idea. It requires you to abandon the (often unconscious) attitude that “those people” can't be trusted to make good decisions.

Getting started, however, is easy if you are willing to try an experiment.

Have a bias in favor of letting people try things, even if you think they probably will not work. Look for opportunities to let your people make decisions. Trust that they will change things that do not work. Remember: