Rectifications (13) – Empower…*

Rectifications (13) – Empower…*
Torrey Orton – July 22, 2009

“… Since people of all political persuasions have a need for a word that makes their constituents feel that they are or are about to become more in control of their destinies, empower has been adopted by conservatives as well as social reformers....”
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/empower

Three itches

Of the gratuitous deceptions contemporary management PCness visit upon us, empowerment is among my most despised. The concept inhabits all manner of organisational communications – for profit and not, alike – often in company with that other favourite ‘make a difference’ and its fellows like ‘add value’. Three itches rise for a scratch from the claim to be empowering anyone else. First, personal power cannot be given, only taken. Role power can be given and taken away, usually not by the weaker role holder except by strenuous and secret exercise of personal power (i.e. going over the head of direct reports).

Second, pretending personal power can be achieved through empowering by others is sure to muddy the usually opaque waters of a work group’s responsibilities and performance. For example, as a work group member, where does my role power stop and my colleagues and our boss’s start again? If I am unclear about that, the limits to my personal power are hard to establish and difficult to defend from allegations I am over-powering the management’s role accountabilities (credit for achievements they see as theirs by role) or under-fulfilling their expectations (my responsibilities expressed in KPI’s, tasks and such).

And I may be doing so without intent either way. To say we are in a power partnership invites interactions of greater volatility than before the days of transparent empowerment. In those days we knew we often weren’t on shared ground. Who can reprimand who? Who can fire who? Who can hire who? These are role powers whose use by management are the first thing workers look to in assessing organisational fairness and management competence.

Third, as in many other public, social situations, to name the outcome you want as the objective has the effect of obscuring the pathway with assumptions that are unchallengeable. For example, ‘Maybe I don’t want to be empowered as you are suggesting. Can we negotiate this?’ Now we have an apparent conflict of espoused values, a much more difficult negotiation than who is responsible for handing on a piece of work from one step to another.

Power and learning

It is a simple matter to note that we can acquire personal power only by becoming good at something. Note also that the power of persons and their roles are often not the same. A common management failure is that of a low power person in a high position not using the position power they have. All workers know how to detect this weakness and some know how to exploit it. It spreads like the rings of an oil slick on a calm surface plinked by the first drop of a storm. Knowing how these things work in specific workplace contexts constitutes a major part of the ‘local knowledge’ which allows real organisations to function. This is in part due to the power dilemma which underlies all delegations….that we are all in each other’s hands, but those with position power are more able to fence out unwanted responsibilities and rope desired ones in (by selectively claiming the achievements as their own via delegation return).

This confusion clangs against the side of the accountability – delegation disorder which I will post on soon. For lack of two-way clarity about delegations of responsibility, the powers of the respective role-holders are confused. It is not for lack of trying that performance management – the process of ensuring that delegated responsibilities have been carried out - is among the more disappointing activities in organisational life. Notice that this is not merely a small scale occasional activity; it also can be seen failing at highest levels. Try executive remuneration and organisational performance in the GFC!

The idea of empowerment also tangles with well-understood mastery learning theory and research. Basically, you can only get to competence by passing various hurdles; the higher and more intense the competence, the greater the effort and recovery from stumbles along the way. The competence in organisational life must be more than knowing about the subject. An old engineering rule of thumb is that graduates are 25% of the way to practitioners on graduation. Most of what they need to know about doing engineering is learned at work.

What to do about 'empowerment'?

Combat the sliming of real developmental relationships – teaching, mentoring, coaching, etc. – by the oil of empowerment. Delete ‘empower’ wherever you see it and replace with help, enable, instruct, demonstrate (learning words) in sentences which specify the relevant outcome of the development as a skill, competence, capability, practice. If such verbs cannot be used you can suspect its only empowerment on offer and get your disappointment deflection armoury ready.

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