Empowerment and The Peak Performance Zone

I remember back in high school when I was playing competitive tennis, our coach used to tell us, "Always play somebody better than you. It'll force you to improve and challenge you to enhance your game rapidly." For the most part, this was pretty good advice. However, what I found was that if I played someone significantly better than I was—where I was struggling to even hit the ball, much less try to win a point—it didn’t make me better at all. In fact, it was incredibly demotivating and almost made me want to give up on the game entirely. Why even bother when there are people so much better? It wasn’t fun at all.

I share this story because I was working with a client recently, and we were discussing the topic of empowerment and empowering employees. Generally, one might think, "Hey, empowering employees is a good thing, right?" The more we empower them to do the work without micromanaging, the more autonomy and agency they have, and everyone’s happy.

Not so much.

This leader tried empowering their staff by giving them an assignment to solve a problem within their organization. Instead of feeling grateful and capable, the employees felt frustrated and demotivated feeling like they not only had to do their work but now the work of the leader as well.

As we explored what happened, we realized that my tennis analogy was on point (okay, didn’t mean to make a pun, but I’ll leave it in regardless). They were given a task that they weren’t yet capable of handling. Maybe they lacked the training, experience, support, or resources. So empowerment isn’t always a good thing – it exists on a spectrum. You could be empowered to complete a task well below your skill level – like making the coffee each day, or handling the microphone at an all employee meeting, which can create boredom at best and more likely resentment because you're being asked to do something beneath your capabilities. On the other end of the spectrum, you can be empowered to solve the impossible task. Imagine a sales team being empowered to hit a sales number, but they might not have any product supply.

So, really, what we want to achieve is to get into the Engagement Zone. You want to match whatever tasks that people are given with their capabilities and skill level. These capabilities could be related to training or resources and support they get from the organization. Even better is hitting the Flow Zone. Research has shown that if we're pushed just beyond our level of capability, then what my old high school tennis coach said was true. We play someone better, and it makes us work harder, think differently, find creative solutions, and actually improve our game and the experience of being in flow is incredibly addictive. But there's a pretty small window for this peak performance flow zone—it has to be just within reach, stretching you beyond your capabilities but not to the point of the impossible. Once you push past that, even a little, motivation, engagement, and productivity drop off dramatically.

The next time you're thinking about how to continue to challenge your employees, consider where they are relative to their capabilities. This applies not just to individuals but also to organizations, especially those that have gone through significant changes, like shifts in leadership, technology, or direction. These factors can dramatically impact not just employee engagement but overall productivity and performance.

Ref: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience”

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