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Building a Culture of Empowerment

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Building a Culture of Empowerment BUILDING A CULTURE OF EMPOWERMENT Leading for culture where both employees and business can overcome challenges, reach their highest potential, and truly thrive. WWW.TENFOLDBRAND.COM CONTENTS 03 Does your organization have a culture of empowerment? 04 Why is it so hard? 04 THE TYRANNY OF CONSENSUS 05 STRATEGIC VISION MIA 06 RIGHT CHAIRS, WRONG BUTTS 07 THE COMFORT OF MICROMANAGEMENT 08 Power a culture of empowerment 08 KNOW WHAT YOU’RE UP AGAINST 09 ARTICULATE THE FULL CULTURAL VISION 10 REINFORCE, REINFORCE, REINFORCE 11 Start where you are www.tenfoldbrand.com | @tenfoldbrand 2 DOES YOUR ORGANIZATION HAVE A CULTURE OF EMPOWERMENT? Most leaders would like to answer that question with a resounding “Absolutely.” But many can’t. By our definition, a culture of empowerment is a set of organizational values, norms, policies, and practices marked by the granting of authority, power, and ownership to others across levels. It’s an environment where people routinely step beyond their assigned roles and responsibilities to suggest new ideas and practices or help others with key tasks; where strategic risk-taking is not only encouraged but celebrated; where people offer thoughtful, critical feedback to teammates without prompting, even to the CEO. Importantly, a culture of empowerment creates large benefits for your organization, including higher levels of creativity and innovation, better customer service, stronger morale, and improved hiring and turnover. Companies with cultures marked by high levels of trust and empowerment are more than 2.5 times as likely to be revenue leaders in their industries than others, and to outperform on other important dimensions.1 So why doesn’t every organization have such a culture? Because it’s not easy. In fact, it’s often easier not to strive for a culture of empowerment, to simply maintain the status quo. The good news is that change is possible. We’ve seen it multiple times in helping client organizations transform their cultures into truly empowering ones. This article helps you approach the challenge of building a culture of empowerment. First, we lay out the most common reasons many organizations struggle to build and maintain an empowerment culture to help you understand the very real barriers in place in your organization now or that you may encounter on this journey; these range from missing strategic visions to misalignment of people and roles. Second, we offer practical tips for creating an empowerment culture, from knowing what you’re up against to reinforcing positive values and practices. Finally, we help you start where you are, to make progress without feeling overwhelmed. We back up our ideas with real-life examples from organizations dealing with wide-ranging cultural issues, including those we’ve worked with. 1 Andrew Atkins, “The Benefits of Trust, Empowerment, and Innovation,” The Globe and Mail, February 1, 2016, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/ report-on-business/careers/leadership-lab/the-benefits-of-trust-empowerment-and-innovation/article28416563/ (accessed November 5, 2018). www.tenfoldbrand.com | @tenfoldbrand 3 WHY IS BUILDING AN EMPOWERMENT CULTURE SO HARD? If strong cultures of empowerment came “in a bottle”, every organization would—or at least should—have one. But building such a culture isn’t easy by any stretch. It requires mutually reinforcing elements such as thoughtful, proactive leadership; organization-wide trust and open communication; proper infrastructure (such as accountability measures and mechanisms); and strong, ongoing employee engagement. So it’s no surprise that many organizations, even those with the best intentions, end up with suboptimal cultures, typically without realizing it. Here are four of the most common, potentially overlapping ways culture may be led astray, away from empowerment. 1 THE TYRANNY OF CONSENSUS Agreement on direction, strategy, and other organizational issues is great, and critical to have in many cases. But you can have too much of a good thing. That was the case at a large healthcare organization (30,000+ employees). There, all high-level decisions were made by committee, with leaders laser-focused on promoting agreement and even unanimity. This mentality created a culture of bureaucracy marked by political maneuvering to sway committee members toward specific decisions. Key decisions, not surprisingly, took a long time, and people sometimes “agreed” just for the sake of moving on, resulting in an artificial sense of consensus. As much as 50% of people’s time was spent in meetings versus carrying out their responsibilities. Moreover, due to the group-based decision-making, no one leader could be held accountable for a given initiative’s success or failure. Similarly, the organization had notoriously poor delegation: committees failed to assign specific responsibilities to specific people, again resulting in delays and poor accountability. The consequent, if unintentional, “Cover Your Ass,” disempowering culture was associated with poor morale, high turnover, and suboptimal organizational performance. Unfortunately, cultures of consensus are not uncommon, and impede development of a more empowering environment. www.tenfoldbrand.com | @tenfoldbrand 4 WHY IS BUILDING AN EMPOWERMENT CULTURE SO HARD? 2 STRATEGIC VISION MIA Vision is what sets direction for and galvanizes your organization. Even some organizations with healthy-seeming cultures or a clear “reason for being” lack this critical element. By “strategic vision” we mean not the overarching view of what the organization is meant to do and be, but the 3- to 5-year objective that leaders set; this is typically the responsibility of the CEO and their team. While many, if not most, organizations spend time defining and communicating their foundational purpose, mission, and values, too many lack an intermediate-term vision to inspire and engage people at every level. For example, we worked with a large nonprofit where the general vision and mission were clear and morale was high overall. But closer analysis—largely through employee interviews—revealed that people were struggling with “what they were doing and why” on a day-to-day basis. They felt good about working there, but unclear on what they were working toward, with little perceived power to make the difference they wanted to. We recommended that the nonprofit’s leaders formulate and articulate a clear strategic vision to give direction to all ideas, initiatives, and progress measures: with special attention to whom—what beneficiary group—the organization is serving and how each group and job function aligned with that service. We emphasized that developing such a vision was the best way by far to get everyone “rowing in the right direction,” as part of a more inspiring, empowering culture for the short and long term. www.tenfoldbrand.com | @tenfoldbrand 5 WHY IS BUILDING AN EMPOWERMENT CULTURE SO HARD? 3 RIGHT CHAIRS, WRONG BUTTS A mismatch of talent and jobs or roles is a common and frustrating detractor from culture. Even the most talented people will struggle to achieve their goals effectively, if at all, when placed in the wrong role; when the problem is widespread, performance and morale will plummet. One of the most common problems we see is tactical thinkers sitting in strategic seats. Consider the case of the healthcare industry. Within hospitals, mid-level managers are often hired from within, based on their performance with tactical responsibilities—such as a highly skilled ultrasound technician promoted to lead a team of such colleagues. The challenge is that some very capable tacticians may struggle with more strategic leadership skills, whether the ability to craft a vision for the area, to coach and mentor teammates, or to create strategic group communications. A recent Nursing Times article summed up the issue well: “The practice of promoting long-serving nurses to managerial positions seems logical — they are likely to have highly developed clinical skills. ...But the nebulous skill of leadership often considered vital to managers is not easily picked up by observation. The mysterious art of people management is a profession and a vocation in itself.”2 That means hospitals end up misaligning talent with roles in many cases, diminishing performance and morale at individual and organizational levels. The alignment problem appears in sectors well beyond healthcare, of course. Moreover, beyond failing to use your people’s talents effectively (in a way that’s also satisfying for them), a mismatch of people and positions almost always means the failure of executive-level initiatives and directives, as too many mid-level people lack the strategic skills to carry these out. Opportunities for department-level innovation are missed. Top talent—whether in the right roles or not—will grow increasingly frustrated and either disengage or depart, disastrous consequences that only erode the culture further. 2 Stephen Riddell, “Why Do Nurses Believe They Are Management Material?” Nursing Times, November 17, 2011, https://www.nursingtimes.net/ roles/nurse-managers/why-do-nurses-believe-they-are-management-material/5037983.article (accessed November 5, 2018). www.tenfoldbrand.com | @tenfoldbrand 6 WHY IS BUILDING AN EMPOWERMENT CULTURE SO HARD? 4 THE COMFORT OF MICROMANAGEMENT “Micromanagement” is a dirty word in organizational circles, eliciting the image of managers constantly looking over their people’s shoulders, to the detriment of performance and culture. But here’s a little secret: micromanagement is often easier than empowerment, which helps explain its ubiquity across sectors. It’s a problem at all organizational levels. The tendency to be overinvolved in reports’ responsibilities or tasks starts at the top in organizations where micromanagement is a problem. In fact, one online survey of over 5000 leaders showed that 48% of executives like to be seen as experts or authority figures and 41% have a “strong desire” for power. These feelings can lead easily to the need to be in control of all outcomes and part of all decision-making, even if the intention is to ensure strong performance. Moreover, employees often feel safer, at least in the short term, when part of a micromanagement- focused culture.
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