Cultural Myths of Empowerment
My previous post Product Owner — A Stepping Stone showed some common problems with a Product Owner -Dev Team model. That post dangled “empowered teams” as a tantalizing answer.
I want to unpack “empowered,” though, because we need to deal with some cultural baggage up front. This is particularly for people doing the empowering, but if you’re on the receiving end of bad empowerment, here’s some free validation.
When I say “empowerment,” you probably do one of two things. Option 1 is you gag at the empty management-speak. It’s a serious concept, though, so stay with me. If it gets past your BS filter, you probably Option 2: you imagine one person doing a thing to another, like a coronation. As if empowerment is blessing. Or a gift. One person does empowerment, and the other receives it and is empowered.
Unfortunately, I know from personal experience that this way of thinking, which is practically hard-wired into our brains, leads to three big misconceptions:
Myth 1: Everyone wants empowerment
I mean, it sounds really good. And if you’re thinking of empowerment like a blessing, well who wouldn’t want that?
If you hear words like, “I’m looking for bigger challenges, I fully trust you, and I’ll take whatever opportunities you think are best” then you can bust out the magic empowerment wand.
In my personal experience, though, that’s not the mental state of most potential empowerees. MUCH more often, they feel torn in multiple directions, overworked, frustrated with things out of their control. I’m not sure I believe most Americans are stressed most of the time, but it’s not all rosy either.
Aha! you think. I will heroically toss them some empowerment and bask in their gratitude! Sure, they’ll see something flying at them. In their experience, though, it’s more likely to be excrement or a dead cow over the siege wall.
In other words, perspective is everything. If trust is weak, or if the empowerment they want is not what you want to support, you’re not going to make anyone cheer. Done carelessly, you can make the overwhelmed feeling worse. The recipient’s resistance can come as a nasty shock to someone with good motives.
War story: We tried to empower product development teams to make more product decisions for themselves. This went down badly when we said, “Tada! you’re managing your own backlogs now!” What many wanted was a more engaged product manager, not the extra burden of balancing business needs and responsibility for the decisions. We said “empowerment,” and they heard, “more responsibility with less support.” That was a fair cop. See The A-word for that story.
Myth 2: Only successful people/teams are ready for empowerment
Remember our typical frustrated, overstressed worker? Well, that person is passed right over when leaders look for development candidates. They think of that other lady who is visibly successful, totally in control, and hungry for bigger challenges. The frustrated one? That’s someone to fix, not empower.
Not so! I mean, you can run your business how you like. In my experience, though, if you ignore frustrated, off-their-game people, you rule out the most promising candidates for responsibility. Frustrated people are a huge opportunity: they’re engaged and they want change. If you start with listening not telling, this situation can turn around fast.
War story: I’ve had this done to me (arrogant, I know, huh?), being taken from disgruntled troublemaker to vocal advocate. Coopting the opposition, I guess. I’ve done this right and wrong with others as well. When I’ve done it wrong, discouraged people from involvement because they weren’t helping, I’ve never recovered from the disengagement and disillusionment it’s caused. In the opposite case, it’s been time-consuming to empower frustrated people, but let’s be honest, grumpy people are always time-consuming.
Myth 3: Being empowered is empowering.
Transfer responsibility to someone, and their experience isn’t one of empowerment. It just isn’t. Take your pointy hair off for a minute, and think about what makes you feel powerful. For me, power is confidence, knowing I can do a difficult thing. Empowerment is anything that boosts that confidence: again for me, that means access to education, up-close examples, knowing where to get help. It means being included in the right conversations, again all about access. Power is the feeling that whatever I do, the result is going to be somewhere between OK and great.
If you allow me to do thing, I don’t experience that positively. It’s the absence of a negative. The act of “permitting” can be disempowering. If my boss tells me I’m allowed to get coffee between meetings, I suddenly start questioning. Wait, I wasn’t allowed coffee before? Does that apply to tea too? To cookies? It gives me less confidence, not more.
If you’re ever in a position to lead me, I’ll give you a cheat-sheet: I feel empowered when I want to do a thing, I’m reasonably sure I can, and nothing’s going to stop me.
This is not an original thought — far from it. Dan Pink listed these as “Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose” in Drive. Captain L. David Marquet puts the same ingredients in the same order, as “Control, Competence, and Clarity” in Turn the Ship Around. Both of these are essential empowerment reading, by the way.
I’ll talk about how these interact in Part II: the Ingredients of Empowerment.
But for now I’ll summarize:
- empowerment is not a thing you can do to someone, it’s an environment you create for them. See https://m.signalvnoise.com/dont-empower-anybody-8302afec81bc
- empowerment without buy-in is just another shit-bucket and will be welcomed as such. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1048984316000072?via%3Dihub
- To experience empowerment, the empoweree needs some control over the empowerment process. I don’t know a good source for more on this, but it’s pretty obvious. Empowerment without control is called “puppetry.”
- As an empowering person, you are there to make resources — including supportive feedback — readily available for them to take. I prefer an approach like https://squareup.com/townsquare/6-ways-you-can-support-your-employees-growth
