Making Empowerment Work

Making Empowerment Work is the mid-year resolution for me for the rest of the 2023 and going beyond and may well resonate for all lot of leaders elsewhere not just in bio-pharmaceutical but in all different industries worldwide.

Why? Is it because this is Buzz Word in the leaderships circles currently and everyone want to board the bandwagon? or there are proven results of the empowerment.

While the true result of the empowerment remains under investigation and to be validate by the corporate gurus, but individual experience varies.

In my last 13 years of being on both sides of the table I have experienced that Over-empowering without setting clear direction and training lead to unexpected results. This is just not detrimental for the team but harmful for the leaders and organizations in the journey to implementing empowerment. Such bad tasting experience may change the view of the leaders to not empower and be inflexible with old ways of working, doing it all by themselves, not delegating and not developing the teams under them to work on autopilot.

Eventually leaders leaving without a great successor who can carry the legacy they built. What good of a leader if the place falls apart when they leave. Often such leaders are unable to have telescopic vision of the future; commonly said big picture.

On the other hand, Under-empowering is proven to create stressful workplaces, employee burn-out, close supervision even in petty tasks but also under development of employees and an inability to develop the nursery of the talent and the future leaders.

For Leaders, in order to make empowerment work in their organization they need to ensure it’s the right balance of empowerment, which means they have the ability to assess empowerment level and match to the developmental level of the individual. To ensure not to under empower and frustrate people and also not to over empower and fail them miserably.

Ability to empower effectively and without discrimination talks about the ability of the leaders to see near and far. Be able to use both telescope and microspore when needed.

It talks about the trust leaders have in their teams.

It talks about a leader’s ability to translate potential to performance.

It also speaks volume of a leader’s ability to communicate effectively and courageously and let their team be aware of the ways they can earn empowerment.

I can go on and on about the perks of it... but

Most importantly to me it demonstrates the courage of a leader to develop more leaders and not followers without being insecure; as we all have our own destinies to follow.

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