Empowerment - Inside Out

“While growing up in Southern India, whenever I visited a temple, the sight of a huge elephant tied up with a small rope always amazed me! On the other side, seeing elephants pulling tons of wooden logs, causing mayhem in tens of acres of sugarcane fields, kept me perplexed how they can be restrained with a tiny rope at the temple. Later I realized the elephant is the potential in oneself and the tiny rope is the imaginary constraints that one constantly experiences which makes them ‘powerless’. Ever since, I evidenced this fact, started working with teams around me to bring clarity around strengths, opportunities, objectives and purpose in general. Enjoyed winning through others!”

This is a very personal?but powerful story shared to me by a former colleague, Dr Srini Karra on my website. How often in our life that we have been hampered by those imaginary constraints and fears??It’s only when we admit our fears and recognize how those imaginary constraints are holding us back that we can begin moving forward.

Empowerment has become a buzzword in the business world and widely used in many contexts. Working environment that empowers employees has been shown to not only improve employee job satisfaction and loyalty, but also improve decision making by inspiring employees to engage in more critical and creative thinking. However, it is often very difficult to have a truly empowered working environment, partly because there is a misconception that empowerment simply means “giving people the power to make decisions”, rather than the concept of?trusting that people already have the knowledge and abilities?to make those decisions themselves.

From the perspective of aspiring leaders who are seeking for empowerment, it is very critical to understand and internalize that empowerment requires you to take ownership of issues, rather than “waiting to be empowered”. You need to be proactive in participation in the decision makings that concerning your own well being, your own rights, either in the business environment or broad society context.?The question you should ask yourself is not who is going to let you, but rather who is going to stop you.?

Most western businesses today operate as global business units. Headquarters often make strategic decisions and local or regional teams in different parts of the world simply implement the strategy or plan. There is always a tug between the two different centers of gravity. On the one hand, HQ team often feels that they tend to have the strategic view of overall business strategy while the local teams tend to believe they know what it takes to win the market and customers. It is similar to the typical tension between marketing and sales team in many organizations. It is ever more a prominent issue for large markets such as China or India. Do you have a global strategy and figure out how to implement in China or do you have China strategy since it is whole different market dynamics? How much do you empower the local teams for key decision making? Does empowerment work in a different culture?

During my assignment in China to lead ExxonMobil capital investment project, we worked with the consulting group started by General Stan McChrystal to facilitate the “team of team” concept in order to have more effective team works between the headquarter team and the local teams in China. It was during those discussion that I suddenly realized that proper translation for the word “empowerment” simply did not exist in Chinese. It is often translated to something along the line of “permission” which has a very different connotation in English. It is partly a reflection of the culture not only in China, but many East Asian countries. While employees in the West are typically looking for independence from their bosses and "ownership" of their jobs,?trying to empower employees in China with the same mindset often gets the opposite of what you expect.

During my interview with Keith Hartsfield, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer of I-Robot, he recalled his experience when he was with Motorola managing a team in China. He told me that he travelled to China on a regular base working with the team but the dynamic did not start as he had expected.?

“But when I got there, it was like this. I was the big boss guy who's supposed to tell everybody what to do. And the first couple of months they were really worried because I was not telling them what to do. I was asking them all these questions, and they weren't used to sharing what they actually thought.”

This reaction?is not uncommon among newly arrived Western executives in China. He wasn't wrong to try to empower his employees. But he didn't appreciate that Chinese culture and history work to prevent employees from taking advantage of empowerment when it's offered to them where there is a natural tendency of deference to authority.?

First of all, the culture of deference to authority often makes employees hunker down until they can figure out what's really on the boss's mind, rather than thinking and acting independently for action.?

In addition,?Chinese employees?often tend to be fearful of making mistakes, especially with a new leader or in a new working environment. They worry about inadvertently straying too far from where the leader wants them to be, and they see risk in asking questions that might make them appear ignorant and expose them to painful criticism. Although the younger generations who have been exposed to the western working culture are becoming increasingly vocal, many still tend to be reticent in work place in such environment.?

In order to encourage and energize the team, Keith spent a lot of personal times with the team members in order to establish trust and get to know them at a personal level. Eventually they “loosened up and I start to understand what they thought would take to succeed? What they thought success look like? Because my definition was different from theirs in many cases.”

“Eyes on, hands off” is how one of my former colleagues, Dr. Prassana Joshi, succintly described empowerment in a comment of one of my?blog posts about empowerment. While empowerment is important in most work places, there are cultural quirks unique to any workplace, and— while it won't be as different as working on the other side of the world as shown in the China example — they need to be ready to assess and adjust their approach to empowerment with every unique situation.?

In summary,?empowerment is not simply a buzzword. It is all about trust and about recognizing the potential of employees. It is about becoming stronger and powerful within ourselves. By doing so, empowerment will increase the capacity of individuals or groups to make choices and to transform those choices into desired actions and outcomes.?

Don't let the tiny rope on the elephant become a constraint in what you should pursue and what you could achieve.

Leadership Book Update:

This article on empowerment is an abbrevated version for linkedin posting. Please read the full version on my website which included conversations or quotes from Ananya Jain, Rose Hall, Keith Hartsfield, Srini Karra, Prassana Joshi, and Sebastian Thalanany. Thank you for for your support and contribution to my book project.

Here is the link to the full article.

The book continues progressing well. We have transitioned from interviews, research, and story writings to chapter writing. We are all expected to have a rough version of the book manuscript by July 1 which is less than seven weeks away. I am planning to have direct communications in the coming weeks who have signed up for the book update on my website.

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