The Case for Empowerment
Search most corporate business plans or recruitment pages and it's unlikely to be long before you find reference to a commitment from the company to empower its workforce. Look out also for reference to employee engagement, and of course "we believe our people are our greatest assets."
But talking the talk or writing the word doesn't mean walking the walk is easily realized.
Reverse this, and you won't find many (any?) corporate literature or recruitment which says "we have a firm conviction that top down decision-making is the most effective approach to running our business" or "we are committed to ensuring that people close to the customer are not able to make decisions in the best interests of the customer."
In other words, the idea that giving people more control and empowering teams to make decisions is logical and generally a sensible strategy to adopt for a modern organization.
After all who would not want to lead an organization where
- People are motivated and committed to providing great customer service because they have a genuine sense of ownership
- Leaders don't need to hold people to account, people are motivated to hold themselves and each to account
- Ideas and innovation don't just come from the R &D function but from people doing the work, seeing how customers respond, seeing how the system works
- Problems are spotted early and called out.
- When things do go wrong they don't happen again because teams are learning
- Improvement is embedded into day-to-day work, so that teams are able to learn and adjust how they work to produce better results
- There is low absenteeism and turnover
- Leaders can focus on the big picture and don't get pulled into the operational weeds because they are expected to be the problem solvers
At first glance this feels like a sensible set of expectations. But for many it might feel like a fantasy wish list. This is because the constructs and expectations of traditional organizations work against not in favor of these outcomes. Separation of decision-makers from doers, thinkers and workers, white collar-blue collar, leaders and followers. These are all magnets which pull authority upwards and away from those closest to the work.
Empowerment isn't just something which applies to organizations and employees. In the last 20 years everyone has become more empowered through their smartphones.
Go back as recently as 2001. If you wanted to go on vacation, all the power and information sat with travel agents. They controlled what you could and couldn't find out about a location. And of course, all the hotels were beautiful, the food outstanding and the swimming pool delightful. We didn't know any better because we had no information to tell us otherwise.
And it didn't stop there. If the hotel didn't turn out so great, the food was inedible and the pool unfinished, we could only direct our complaints in one direction – to the travel company. They might respond with an apology or even a voucher to the cost of the next trip but they were still firmly in control.
Now of course, we have been empowered. We don't need travel agents to book vacations, we can check what others have said about the destinations or recommended hotels, and if something goes awry, we can start telling the world about it, and see it go viral.
The consequence of that is that we as consumers have so much more information to hand.
For organizations the consequence is that their customers are now more knowledgeable and more demanding, and that means that people dealing with customers need to be able to respond, to be flexible, to make decisions. But faster decision-making, more engaged people isn't just the preserve of customer facing organizations. So the case for empowerment starts with building an organization that can respond to a more complex and demanding outside world.
We call this Pushing Authority to Information, not Pushing Information to Authority.
Of the six core principles of Intent-Based Leadership, this is the one which should be most on the radar of the c-suite, because this is about how a business chooses to design the way in which decisions are made and where power and authority sits. But in reality, it's much more important than that because it's also about the health and happiness of teams – and if that sounds a bit soft and fluffy, let's cut to the chase – work kills people.
There is now consistent evidence which links levels of morbidity to levels of control at work. We're routinely presented with the notion of the stressed-out executive, but what we don't see is the stress caused when people are working in jobs with high demand, but they have little or no control over what they do and how they do it.
In short, when we give people more control at work we reduce the level of negative stress that people experience and so reduce the level of health-related illnesses.
Barriers and Enablers
In these next pages we examine the barriers to making common sense common practice, and how Intent-Based Leadership helps overcome these barriers.
1. The Leader Follower Model
The most obvious challenge is rooted in 200 years of industrial history. The idea that every business is made of leaders who decide and people who do the work has been the backbone of organization design. It sustained because it worked and was the way to build efficient and effective businesses focused on delivering consistent outputs.
It was reinforced, for example in US Navy Academy Leadership Handbook that stated: Leadership can be defined ... as directing the thoughts, plans, and actions of others ... so as to obtain and command their obedience, their confidence, their respect, and their loyal cooperation.
Trying to push authority down and delegate decision-making in an organization based on leaders and followers is like flying a kite on a windless day. It’s difficult and frustrating and ultimately will be short lived, because the system, expectations and identities of everyone involved will consciously or sub-consciously resist a change of where control sits.
How does Intent-Based Leadership challenge this?
In Turn the Ship Around!, David Marquet introduced the Leader-Leader model to challenge the traditional assumptions of the Leader-Follower model. The proposition of Leader-Leader is simple – that teams work better when there are leaders at all levels, and we don't divide teams between doers and deciders.
In practice this means that being a leader means making decisions, solving problems, spotting potential issues and calling them out, identifying opportunities for improvement. In other words, all things which are within the capability of most people, but are often denied through role definition and structure.
The Leader-Leader model is based on a belief in the potential of people, and the opportunity to release the intrinsic motivation, creativity and capability of others.
2. It's all about the next quarter.
Choosing to give people more control and authority isn't like choosing to give people a pay rise or a new benefit. It takes time and patience and places a demand on leaders and managers to unlearn habits which have been developed through generations of leaders.
The challenge is that companies and leadership teams get drawn like moths to the short-term lightbulb. The need to deliver on immediate priorities, and so longer-term challenges like giving people more authority and involvement become nice to have not hard goals.
How does Intent-Based Leadership help?
We recognize that one of the hardest challenges c-suite leaders face daily is pressure from investors, boards and shareholders. It's ironic because one of the most admired investors, Warren Buffet, seems to see what others can’t see and places long term thinking as prerequisite. "Our favorite holding period is forever," he says, based on the premise that "if we have good long-term expectations, short-term price changes are meaningless for us."
Intent-Based Leaders think long term. They care but don't care. They care deeply about their team's well-being and mission but not about the personal consequences to themselves. This allows for focused, unhindered decision-making, as the leader prioritizes the team's success over their own career or comfort.
3. Identity and Vested Interests
There's often a misunderstanding that if we give people more control, that means that as leaders we have less control. And for people who have spent a career moving up the greasy pole to the acquisition of power, authority and status is important. And often our identity as leaders – our sense of value – is based on being the expert, the fixer, the go-to guy who can solve problems. What happens to that identity if we give people more control and responsibilities?
For the last 200 years at least, organizations have been structured around power and control. Those towards the top of the pyramid have more decision-making authority and influence. Their role is to determine the best way for the organization to operate and then to make sure that happens. The easiest way to think about this is the type of work which people are doing. We call this Red Work and Blue Work. Red work is about getting things done. Every organization needs Red Work, it's the work of production, following process, doing routine tasks and completing them. It's about action. Blue work is about deciding how things get done, including how things can be improved.
So, if you visualize a traditional organization chart, the top is normally where the blue work gets done and the bottom is where the red work is done.
When we push authority to information we are injecting more Blue Work into the lives and working days of those doing the Red Work.
It's here that the work of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan becomes so relevant. Their research showed that there are three core intrinsic motivators and he called this Self Determination Theory.
Self Determination Theory makes the case that people are motivated by three things: having a clear sense of purpose, needing to be seen to be competent and the need to have good relationships with others. Indeed, Deci and Ryan's work was the basis for the much more vaunted Drive by Daniel Pink in which he set out the case for intrinsic motivation based on Purpose, Mastery and Autonomy.
Self Determination Theory therefore provides some explanation as to why leaders and teams find it hard to embrace the potential of empowerment. And the reality is that the default seam for motivation is usually all about the extrinsic tools that leaders have to hand, whether in the form of the carrot (salary, benefits) or the stick (threat of consequences). In a short-term world, extrinsic is much easier to work on than working on the more complex intrinsic motivators.
How does Intent-Based Leadership help?
Intent-Based Leadership is very clearly aligned to Self Determination Theory and the need for people to have autonomy (control), competence and relatedness.
In an Intent-Based Leadership team the role of the traditional leaders change:
- They don't give up control, they give more control
- They move from being decision-makers to decision-evaluators
- Their role becomes more about the developers rather than directors.
- They are the architects of the environment who make it easier for people to make good decisions and perform to their optimum potential.
So, the identity of the leader does change, but they remain integral to the way in which the team is functioning. As the identity evolves the role of the leader shifts from being focused on extrinsic motivators to working on and enabling the intrinsic motivators that will drive the performance and contribution of the team.
4. Fear
The need to demonstrate competence means that one of the fears that stops leaders giving control is "but what happens if something goes wrong?" In fact, this works two ways, because for people being encouraged to take more control and make decisions may also be fearful of getting something wrong, looking stupid, or upsetting the boss.
How does Intent-Based Leadership help?.
Working with Intent doesn't mean that leaders give up control, it means that they give more control.
Working with Intent doesn't mean that leaders are no longer involved, it means that their involvement changes.
Working with Intent provides a safety valve for both leaders and teams:
- When a team member shares their Intent, they're inviting feedback on a decision. It means that the leader is aware about the actions which will follow; they can ask questions, provide more information, and ultimately can veto the decision.
- Provided that a team is operating with Intent, a leader will have the reassurance of knowing what will happen before it happens. Conversely, if teams are given control and don't operate with Intent, a leader may be caught unaware.
- For team members sharing Intent, they know that their line manager is aware of what they are going to do and therefore should have their back if the decision or action doesn't produce the desired result.
So, the leader gains all the benefits of having a team actively thinking, solving problems and making decisions, with none of the risks that would come if this was being done completely autonomously.
5. "People don't want control"
We hear this more regularly than you might think. The explanation goes like this: "We have some great people who will do a great job from 9 to 5 but they're happy doing their job and don't want to be involved in decisions." In response we ask one (tongue in cheek) question – when those same people leave work, do they call someone and ask for instructions on what they should do next?
The point is that choice and autonomy is a natural human desire, and if someone doesn't want this in work it's much more likely to be because of the environment that they work in, than some innate character flaw. If people don't want to be involved it's likely to be because they worry about some negative consequence or implication that comes with this.
How does Intent-Based Leadership help?
We believe that people want autonomy and control over their lives and a sense of value and contribution. But a key guardrail for delegating decision-making is that you can only invite people's involvement – if you force people to do something they are not used to doing its coercion and unlikely to produce any positive outcome.
For teams who have been institutionalized to believe that it's better just to keep your head down and do the job, it can take time and patience. Often it's just about small changes to language – "What do you see here?", "What do you think?" - and nothing more, as people get used to having more involvement and participation.
6. The System
The same organizations who proclaim the value of their people, often including the importance of trust, can inadvertently build systems which work against these values. They decouple what they say from what they do under pressure from markets, regulators, and efficiency drives. They create processes which take authority and discretion away from people.
Organizations are built on management by process rather than leadership by judgement.
In the UK this is known as "computer says no" (after a well-known BBC sketch show), and it leaves front-line teams trapped when they want to be able to help a customer but the system prevents them from doing so.
How does Intent-Based Leadership help?
One of the six principles of Intent-Based Leadership is 'Fix the Environment, not People.' It reflects the reality that the working environment plays a fundamental role in shaping how people behave, perform and make decisions. Policies, procedures, incentives, performance management all influence the choices that people make at work.
So implementing an Intent-Based Leadership approach means that leaders need to adjust and change the operating environment to help people make better decisions and to remove factors which drive the wrong behavior.
7. Absence of Structure (How do I do this?)
This is possibly the single biggest barrier – but the good news is that it might be the easiest to overcome.
Imagine that you have a team member who has worked with you for a while. Their role is to negotiate deals with customers, but you have the final decision. You have a high level of confidence in their capability and you’d like them to take ownership of the deals so that they can be done quicker and you can focus on bigger priorities.
Our instinct in this situation might simply be to say, "Hey, I've got lots of confidence that you can make this decision, so from now on, I want you to make the calls – I am empowering you!" And then at a 1:1 your team member reports that they've done a deal and given the customer a 20% discount. That eats into your margins, and you'll be left having to explain to the FD what has happened. "But you told me I was empowered to make the decisions. We've used discounts before, so I assumed it would be ok."
If we want to give people more control we need to do this using a clear and simple structure which gives both leaders and teams the confidence that delegation does not increase risk.
How does Intent-Based Leadership help?
This is where Intent-Based Leadership comes into its own. It's a system of language and practices that provides a readymade "how-to guide" for leaders and organizations who see the need to push more decision-making closer to those doing the work. We use the word system deliberately. It's a set of interdependent practices which used together realize great gains.
8. Traditional Solutions Fall Short
Of course, over the last 25 years many leadership development and culture change programs will have espoused the promise of empowerment, but they ultimately fall short for one simple reason – the leader-follower model.
As long as we separate organizations between leaders and followers, we create two tiers of ownership. When leadership teams ask, "How can we get them to think like us?" it's a symptom that can only be addressed by breaking the mold of organization design. Leadership programs that focus on how to be more inspirational, empathetic, motivational, or be a better communicator are all based on the assumption that the job of a leader is to build teams who will follow. They serve to reinforce, not break down, the idea that some decide and others do the work.
Why Intent-Based Leadership works.
By breaking the leader-follower model, Intent-Based Leadership recognizes the potential of building leaders at all levels. It changes the role of leaders from being directors to being developers, from being problem solvers to developers of problem solvers, from decision-makers to developers of people who make decisions.
Empowerment isn't a perk; it's an operating choice. When we push authority to information, we stop treating judgment as a scarce executive resource and start treating it as a team capability. Leaders become architects of conditions - clarity of intent, simple guardrails, and feedback loops - so autonomy, competence, and relatedness can actually show up in the work.