Empower the psyche first:

?Some time back I was having a discussion with a friend, a HR Head and he was profoundly explaining?a project that he was helming, “Driving Empowerment”. He elaborated the structural interventions he took to facilitate empowerment, noticeable was “Empowerment Grid” delineating “out of limits” & “With In Limits” for each role. I was listening intently and appreciating few of the steps dilated to facilitate empowerment. Once done he asked my views which I candidly shared. I am sharing the same here and would appreciate your views to enlighten myself further.?

?Contextualization: Business context/reality is extremely critical while deciding whether to drive empowerment or not, there are few contexts in which driving empowerment could be counter-intuitive, for instance dousing a fire, handling an irate high priority client, scaling up quickly to leverage a business opportunity, etc are few contexts where you may not have the luxury of time to pursue empowerment hence decide prudently before embarking.

?Iceberg: Changes in role definitions, organizational de layering, reorganized DOA’s , digitization of business/ people processes, and other systemic changes are pre-requisites of structural empowerment but it's only the tip of the iceberg. For me empowerment is more intrinsic than extrinsic hence psychological empowerment should precede structural empowerment.

?Don't Lead the witness: We need to create and nurture a culture of strong tolerance for People Development, extremely critical for empowerment. Managers often feel pushed to move fast hence are not interested in devoting additional time and efforts to help?reportees do, what they (manager) already know how to do, they try to lead the witness. And in few cases, I have experienced reportees too like this scenario and consciously slip into more of a supportive mode therefore we need to be mindful of what speed we want to run while driving such a?change.?

?Power Amplifiers: Identify power blockers/mongers and counsel them else replace them with power amplifiers, a manager who believes in power as a finite concept is a deterrent and you need to counter him/her else empowerment won't sail through.

?Muscle Building: Build requisite capabilities to help employees in leveraging structural empowerment else empowerment would only remain on ppts & papers. Remember when overnight many HR Ops folks became HR Business Partners but in reality, did they? Yes HRBP was an empowered avtar for HR folks but it required a different mindset and capabilities which unfortunately was not injected timely to many of us and hence we kept doing the same stuff that we were doing before HRBP avtar and took far more time than needed to become business partners.

?Not Load shedding: One impression that I got from my friend was that there was a conscious effort to pass on activities to a reportee which the manager was not interested in doing, now is it empowerment or just load shedding? I feel empowerment is not some superficial power allotment, it is a collaborative and calibrated process where delegator and delegatee both are equally important protagonists. They both need to be on the same page when empowerment is getting triggered.

?Operationalise: As is the case with all the change initiatives, we need to align our people processes to operationalize empowerment. If my PMS & reward processes support avoidance of failures in place of innovation, learning, coaching, and supportive leadership then empowerment will suffer. I have experienced that changes cant be rushed through hence we need to decide upfront what are we willing to let go to win a war.

Helicopter or Hands-on: Empowerment does not mean “hanging the employee out to dry” neither it is “follow me”, I feel it is somewhere in between both these approaches. Delegator should not encourage frequent escalations from the delegatee under the garb of seeking his/her approval nor s/he should be completely hands-off, delegator needs to enable the thought process of the delegatee through coaching, mentoring, capability building, etc. The manager needs to encourage, cheer every step of the process. I read somewhere and found it pretty apt, the manager needs to behave like a “Cheer Leader” while driving empowerment.

?Excelisation: One thing that intrigued me while listening to my friend was to link empowerment grid with KRA’s and publish quarterly dashboards on progress made on Empowerment. I have never been very comfortable with?measuring the progress of softer people indices on an excel sheet and that too at short intervals, to me it sounds like a tick mark activity. Yes, we need to define, the key milestones of an empowering culture/organization and its overall impact on our customers, employees, bottom line, and top-line but with sufficient time latitude.?

?In the end, I would like to sum up that empowerment is more of a psychological thing, it is a subjective state of self-efficacy which an employee feels because of capability/ competence enhancements, role alignment, value/culture alignment with organization, supportive manager et al and it gets amplified through structural empowerments.?

?It is a nurturing process hence keep patience and have faith.

?"Jismo ki baat nahin, dilon tak jana hai"

"Lambi doori tai karne main waqt to lagta hai".