Miami -
The idea of employee empowerment can be very enticing. The reality of it, however, is often more complicated than we imagine.
Empowerment is a buzzword that gets tossed around more than volleyballs here on Miami Beach. One thing empowerment is not? It’s not blindly delegating - or dumping - more work on your employees, which itself can be singularly disempowering to them.
One key to successful empowerment is to understand the inevitability of employee failure and your responsibility to handle it effectively. When you empower people to take on higher-level work and make decisions, they will occasionally fail.
Here are three ways leaders can improve employee empowerment and manage failure well:
First, inspire and train your people for empowerment. Discuss with them their strengths and weaknesses as well as their willingness and ability to assume new responsibilities. Encourage them to ask questions. Play out scenarios ahead of time. Let them shadow you. Understand their time constraints, stress, and fatigue levels - both real and imagined.
Second, accept that empowerment is not a universal prescription. Some people will be better at it and more desirous of it - and are more talented and motivated - than other people. Plus, so much of empowerment success is situational and context driven. What works for somebody in one scenario may not work in other settings.
You need to create guardrails for your people, beyond which they understand the need to confer with you before doing and deciding certain things. The key here is that the guardrails need to be set differently for each of your folks, some wider or narrower than others.
Third, deal with failure properly. Nobody wants to make failure a regular organizational feature, of course, but some of it will occur and can actually boost individual and collective growth if properly vetted.
One clear way to fail in managing failure is to play the blame game. That’s so 20th Century, though finger-pointing certainly remains a human limitation. Yes, people need to be held accountable. The learning needed to avoid making the same mistakes again, however, shuts down in an environment of blame along with most other forms of communication. Blame heightens defensiveness and freezes out introspection and learning.
The leadership scholar Paul Nutt, who somehow estimates that half of all organizational decisions fail in some way, underscores the value of open, blame-free discovery processes in the aftermath of failure.
The journalist Sally Jenkins in her book, “The Right Call: What Sports Teaches Us About Work and Life” (2023) invokes Nutt to describe how Kansas City Chiefs’ Coach Andy Reid dealt with defensive end Dee Ford’s colossal blunder - he was penalized for lining up four inches offside - in the 2019 AFC championship game that handed victory to the Patriots. This was back when New England had a professional football franchise.
“Reid’s central insight,” she writes, “was that organizational failure is always more complicated than a single individual hapless mistake.” In that spirit, Reid “refused to scapegoat Ford or the officials and instead led his team in a frank interrogatory about how to get better.” The Chiefs won the Super Bowl the following year.
Jenkins references Marine Corps Major and Naval Academy Instructor Thomas Schueman who told her, “Real tragedy is when you don’t find meaning in your mistakes.”
Keep in mind that failure is central to the scientific method, for example, and to most aspects of successful entrepreneurship and innovation. Just ask winning, billionaire mogul Jeff Bezos, who failed spectacularly with the Fire Phone, Pets.com, and LivingSocial.
Jenkins concluded her chapter on failure by writing that what makes a worthy leader “is the ability to see the winning and the losing as deeply intertwined.”
Image courtesy of zweikern.