Management: Empowering workers for corporate success: How to get the best from employees at every level

EMPOWERMENT is the buzzword of the moment, but there is still much confusion about how it can be used to most effect.

The source of this is simple. Empowerment is too commonly viewed as something that is only handed down. The focus is on the lowest-rung of the workforce, based on the presumption that all will be well if the shop-floor employees can be allowed to exercise more responsibility and discretion over their work. The Japanese car assembly plant is almost invariably used as the model.

But there is a need to step back a little. All members of the company, from the chief executive down, are employees who should be empowered.

In their work, the chief executive, managers and those involved in production are all using their judgement about what they do and how they do it, but in vastly different ways.

While the room for discretion at production level is limited, at the top it is wide, complex and confusing - and the implications of any decision stretch far into the future.

The mission of the lonely entrepreneur at the top needs to involve longer-term strategic thinking: possible new ways of working; new business areas to enter; or new opportunities made available by advances in technology.

The second point to challenge is the assumption that effective delegation and the creation of an enabling environment alone will make staff feel empowered and enable them to work to their maximum capability. This is not necessarily so.

Consider the other work that needs to be done. In between the lonely entrepreneur at the top and those working in production will be many others running departments or business units. The work of these operational managers is to achieve goals, and they will have to keep many balls in the air to succeed. They will be striving for best practice and for improvements in every aspect of production.

These people will not usually be in a position to know everything that is going on, but the demands on them are great.

Individual components of the output may need to be co- ordinated for example, or their specialist expertise may be required. There is also a need to co-ordinate the production units by ensuring adequate systems are in place.

These first-line managers may be called supervisors, but they may be engineers or other experts. Their work is vital to ensure the quality of production.

For empowerment to be really effective, the organisation needs to acknowledge that the nature of the work and the judgements necessary in each area of the business and at each level are different. Each adds value to those it encompasses or co-ordinates.

Coaching and development are important, but adding value through doing the allotted task effectively is the real key.

Command and control are inimical to empowerment, because a manager commanding and controlling someone else is trying to do at least part of their work, while removing discretion from the process. This is not only stressful and irritating but grossly inefficient because the manager would inevitably be doing his own work otherwise. It is because this happens so often that organisations get under pressure, do not develop their strategy and resort to greater degrees of unproductive behaviour.

The real value of empowerment is upwards. By allowing, encouraging and enabling employees to do their work effectively, managers are permitting themselves the freedom to do their own. As empowerment goes up the chain to the top, more and more people benefit and the whole organisation improves.

Bruce Tofield is a business consultant.