Does having to take decisions at the workplace give you the chills?

In a discussion recently with friends, “empowered employees” featured strongly as a prerequisite for all the positive outcomes for an organization, be it engagement, innovation, creativity or building talent. The group, comprising people that had experience working both in the pre-email era and later, concurred that there seems to be a decision avoidance syndrome at play, with more decisions getting delegated upwards. Upward communication has become easier, thanks to email, Whatsapp and other quick messaging services; it feels easier to mark the boss on email and have them involved at each stage of any change, interaction, relationship rather than take the tough and painful decision that couldn’t be avoided in an earlier era due to the lack of a real time communication medium.

That reminded me of one of my bosses in a very politically dynamic company, during a long and complex Industrial relations situation, saying, “You should take all the decisions. Together, we are required to achieve our goals. If you make a mistake, I can back you up but if I make a mistake, I am not sure of who will back me. So, make all the mistakes that you can but take the goddamn decision!”

Many years later, I realized that some of the decisions that I had taken at the very early stages in my career were those that many people would be hesitant to take even after decades of experience.?Growing in hierarchy, I would copy him, even in style and swagger by telling the factory HR managers in certain teams – “Take any decision that you think is appropriate. There is no wrong decision that I cannot undo”. All swagger, of course, but it seemed to work very well! Got great work from the teams as they would be unafraid to make things happen. Probably addressed the fear of failure or creating more empowerment through delegation, or both.

Very often, we talk about delegation and empowerment concomitantly and leadership/managerial training involves delegating tasks and decisions to create empowered employees. Ram Charan, the management guru, describes this in his book, The Leadership Pipeline, on the differing expectations from leadership role at varying hierarchy levels. The thrust of management is therefore, to put the onus of improving empowerment on the managers. However, empowerment is a larger feeling while delegating is more an action-oriented lens of approaching the issue of what make us empowered or diffident while making decisions. And of which of the two makes us take more significant decisions. It may be pertinent to examine this from the individual’s lens. Delegation skills training programs are frequently suggested as one intervention to improve empowerment.

In academic literature, Spreitzer[i] in his research defines psychological empowerment as ‘intrinsic task motivation’. He says that management practices are a sufficient but not necessary condition for an employee to feel psychologically empowered and that the intrinsic task motivation manifests in four mental processes/actions:

1.?????Meaning that is assigned to the responsibility by the individual with respect to their own expectations,

2.?????Competence, which is the belief in the individual’s ability to do the job,

3.?????Self-regulation, which is the individual’s sense of their autonomy in making choices and decisions in completing the task

4.?????Impact, which is the degree of influence of the individual on the outcomes.

Though the degree of locus of control and self-esteem influence the individual’s perception of their self with respect to the work environment, psychological empowerment is not a personality trait that is generalizable across all work or life situations and is shaped by their sense of the work situations. Two key work-related variables seen as influencing psychological work environment are Organization Information and Rewards.

In essence, an individual is continually attempting to make sense of the various aspects of the world around them in an organization. Decision making flows from that sense. One ?definition - “decision making is a highly contextual, sacred activity, surrounded by myth and ritual and concerned as much with interpretation as with the actual decision choices”.

When talking to managers (and often seen to be the focus of delegation training), a key theme that appears is the need to repose greater trust in the competence of subordinates. Delegation is therefore, necessary even if the outcome were to be of a lower order than what the managers believe to be if they were to do it themselves. The focus here, is on the personality of the manager and their openness to and confidence in delegation.

Employees on the other hand, do not want just the power or the autonomy to decide but also want to experience the other three aspects of purpose, competence, impact. Their confidence in moving forth with decisions comes from their overall sensemaking i.e., their view of the world in the organization. Sensemaking requires a separate focus altogether but for the moment, Weick’s[ii] definition should suffice, that sensemaking is the process of giving meaning to our collective experiences. Each individual is continually and retrospectively giving meaning to experiences, picking cues from the context, favoring plausibility rather than accuracy that enables them to make sense of the organization.

From a developmental perspective, this would support the argument that delegation is not a simple skill that can be easily developed through a two-day program. The key skill to develop is the ability to influence the larger organization’s sensemaking. Weick’s study of the Bhopal gas tragedy and the Mann Gulch disaster is compelling reading from the lens of sensemaking and the consequent decision making that exacerbated the situations. Improving empowerment therefore, requires greater investment in enabling a higher level of organizational sensemaking to eventually have optimum decisions taken by individuals.

Will explore that in a subsequent article.

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[i] Spreitzer,Gretchen M, Psychological Empowerment in the Work Place, Dimensions, Measurement and Validation, Academy of Management Journal, Volume 38

[ii] Weick, Karl E, Sensemaking in Organizations