Managing Leadership^®

This idea predates the modern leadership movement’s cooption of it, as we noted yesterday. But the effort to identify it as a leadership function has only clouded its real organizational meaning.

Some argue that it is essentially to make people feel fulfilled and personally of value at work. This sort of approach can reduce to something as simple - albeit worthwhile - as ensuring that employees have engaging, interesting, important work to do, and explaining the connection of their individual efforts to the overall endeavor.

Others suggest that motivating, inspiring, energizing people is tantamount to empowering them. This drives us back to the promotion of individual leadership types such as the charismatic or inspirational leader. It also equates empowered employees with properly propagandized followers, whose empowerment consists in their giving force to the leader’s initiatives.

But the concept of empowering the workforce originally meant much more than that. Certainly, some of what we’ve just covered can be traced as far back as Douglas McGregor’s Theory Y. However, it should be noted that this concept was essentially a motivational theory, basing its prescriptions on the true nature of the people to be managed.

The more complete sense of employee empowerment actually goes back at least to the time of Mary Parker Follett, who observed and commented on its application in real working organizations nearly a century ago. Imagining ourselves, as we do, to be inexpressibly more enlightened that the workplaces of so long ago, this may be hard to accept.

And, indeed, it certainly wasn’t the standard then - otherwise, she would have found less need to remark on it. But she found that a workforce that was empowered wasn’t simply made to have higher morale, or to feel more energized, or to be more productive at assigned duties. They were better at identifying and organizing those duties. That is: such a workforce contributes directly and powerfully - on the basis of its own initiatives - to the bottom line.

That’s what employee empowerment really is. It is suitable discretion for determining, arranging, and executing one’s activities, produced from a kind of combination of McGregor-style appreciation of employee motivation with Follett-style advocacy of the creation of additional power and capability within an organization.

But to be worthy of the name it must be done as a policy, integrated into the managerial structure of the organization, rather than randomly exercised according to personal inclination, or defaulted to when a manager is too busy to provide real direction. It must come from the top.

Does that mean it is a leadership function? In the context of our current discussion it cannot be said to be so. It is not really future-oriented, but centered on the work environment and the dynamics that are encouraged and cultivated there. This is a classic management problem, and empowerment of employees is clearly a management function.

But does it take a leader to provide it - someone of vision or courage to see the potential of such an approach and to follow through despite the risks? No. The very ascription of the empowerment of employees to the singular character of a “leader” eviscerates that empowerment, making it about the leader rather than the employees.

So there we have it: employee empowerment is a management function, organized, cultivated - and managed - by managers. Don’t you agree?

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Today’s tip: Speaking of power and who’s got it, please see this piece by Nic Paton at Management-Issues about the strengths of Chinese managers, and the dangers of the reflexive Western instinct to be dismissive of them.

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Technorati Tags: leadership, work, employee, leader, empower, initiative, workforce, Douglas McGregor, Theory Y, motivation, productive, power, capability, organization, manager, management, vision, courage, Nic Paton, Management-Issues, Mary Parker Follett

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