Walking The Empowerment Tightrope

Balancing Management Authority & Employee Influence

Robert P Crosby

• Publisher: Crosby OD Publishing
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780977690053
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Effectively leading your work group is the key task for all managers. Yet, most manager/supervisors are self-taught and get promoted for being excellent individual contributors. How to manage well is a different challenge. This book is built around 25 high-performance factors with findings gleaned from data across 600 companies. First presented at a NASA quality conference, each factor has action steps outlined especially aimed at mid-managers and supervisors. Besides the practical tools needed, it also helps managers find balance in how they use their management authority. Most managers tend to exercise either too much management authority or the other extreme, abdication; this issue is addressed head on. When a manager is clear about how to use their authority in a balanced way, everyone gets appropriately empowered, including the manager themselves. This results in a workplace with open and accountable employees striving towards success.

Chapter One

Empowerment and High Performance

The struggle between decisiveness and influence is an ongoing dance. That leaders and followers need each other is surely in the category of a universally accepted axiom. Equally obvious is the tragedy perpetuated in the 20th century from dysfunctional dances when the balance was missing. Usually there was too much authority placed in the leader, or too little. This has been true in nations, organizations, and families. The familiar polarization in families between the over-authoritarian parent and the permissive parent is also manifest in large systems. More accurately, authorities often are inconsistent and flip from being authoritarian to being permissive and back again. The statement about parenting, “Parents are authoritarian until they can’t stand themselves and then permissive until they can’t stand the kids,”¹ also characterizes much management behavior.

Finding the appropriate balance in leadership style is extremely difficult. This book has been written for the manager who is ready to do a different dance but not give up the leadership role that is appropriate and desperately needed. “The goal is to change the organizational dance in such a way that the whole system experiences change … and … if you change your individual dance, the whole system will react.”²

The creation of an empowered and high-performing organization is dependent on several factors. The author, using his personal experience and data from over 500 United States, Canadian, and British organizations, has identified 25 factors that impact performance.³ When these factors are attended to, productivity and quality are high, absenteeism is low, accidents are reduced, and employees are more likely both to enjoy and be motivated in their work environment. In other words, people are empowered.

The good news is that these factors are influenced primarily by the manager of a work team. While individual motivation is important, the dominant force in a work team is the line manager.⁴ Managers are not elected, but there are important parallels between political democracy and democracy in the work place. For instance, the role of leadership cannot be abdicated. There is no democracy without authority. The art of managing is to balance the imagined polarities between authority and influence.

The jargon self-managing teams (autonomous work teams/self-directed teams) is popular today. (See Appendix A for more about self-managing teams.) Unfortunately, many employees and managers define such teams without taking into account the need for clear management authority. It is our experience that teams will fail without the balance we describe. The tension in political democracy between freedom and justice, and between citizen influence and government authority, will be with us forever. Likewise, the struggle in organizations about how to tap the energy and expertise of employees, while also managing with optimum authority, is an ongoing one.

This struggle cannot be solved by the extremes of authoritarianism or permissiveness. Further, management by consensus as the exclusive style, rather than only when appropriate, is a disaster. When overused, consensus is time consuming and is often controlled by the most rigid or resistant members. (This will be further developed in the Action Idea for Factor 4.)

Toward understanding the desired balance, little attention has been given to two factors that were crucial to the Japanese success story. First, the Japanese had a long history of authority that was rooted in the family. After the Great War, when they developed effective ways to involve workers, they did so in the context of accepted authority. Employee influence was not translated to mean the abdication of authority by management.

Our Canadian and US consulting experiences have been otherwise. Both managers and employees often have unrealistic and dysfunctional expectations about the minimized role of authority when terms like participative management, employee involvement, or self-managing teams are used. Either the employees think they will be deciding everything or, at the other extreme, that the new emphasis is really the old authoritarianism in a new mask. Usually management is equally confused.

The word democracy is paradoxically suspect among US and Canadian managers. It is a politically prized term, but it is often equated with permissiveness or lack of leadership in the business sphere.

Also, when we read in the New York Times about the Volvo Uddevalla humanistic manufacturing experiment in Sweden, we wondered if the same lack of clear leadership and authority may not have been an important variable. It takes 50 hours of labor to build a car at Uddevalla. In contrast, the time required to build a car in Japan is 17 hours and in the United States, 25 hours. The Uddevalla plant workers take longer to assemble a car than the workers at the other three more traditional Volvo plants. “The approach, which entailed slashing layers of management and eliminating all foremen … (also aimed to) give them (the employees) more control over their jobs.”⁵ I would rather have retrained the foremen and groups to achieve the balance emphasized in this book.

A second factor that may have influenced Japanese success is the apparently deeply imbedded cultural belief described by Joseph Campbell as follows:⁶

The Buddhist teaching … the Doctrine of Mutual Arising … implies that no one — nobody and no thing — is to blame for anything that ever occurs, because all is mutually arising. That fundamentally is one reason why in Japan, even shortly following World War II, I found among the people I met no resentment. Enemies mutually arise: they are two parts of the one thing. A leader and his following also are parts of the one thing. You and your enemies, you and your friends: all parts of the one thing, one wreath: “thing and thing: no division.”

This context is not easy to come by in the United States. Managers must strive constantly to recreate a nonblaming work context. The productive context is one of making it work rather than finding fault and blame. Without this frame or way of seeing, authority will be viewed as existing primarily for punishment (of the blamed) rather than for vision, support, and clarity. Messengers will continue to get shot.

Context is powerful. How you think and speak about employee influence is highly instrumental in your creation of the work culture. Ideally, employee influence applies to every employee, from the least paid to the CEO. It is a process of fully utilizing the talents and experiences of everyone.

Top managers depend on an effectively functioning middle and bottom. More than any others, middle managers work in a void. Top managers often wonder what it takes to get things operating the way they want. The basic context is that employee influence truly means that all employees, from the hourly to the CEO, be empowered.

Also, as stated above, empowerment must be implemented in the context of making it work. In the context of finding fault, griping, and blaming, employee influence and involvement is a negative, defeating force. Making it work means that anything can be discussed with minimal defensiveness. Finding fault means that underlying causes will be avoided, people will be defensive, feedback will be distorted, and empowerment efforts will fail. Finding fault focuses on the narrow spectrum of what is wrong. Making it work encourages a search for new opportunities for productivity and facing up to persistent problems. The fundamental basis for effective influence is a shift in this context. The action ideas in Chapter Three can help you achieve this shift.

Another crucial context is economics. Employee influence is about economic success. Companies have to make money; competition is tough. Employees know that today, more than ever, they have seen many companies fail. Empowerment done well increases productivity. That it also creates a better and more humane work place is a happy corollary. The economic context is believable. With that context clearly acknowledged, company leaders are more believable when they discuss employee influence. Without that context being central and visible, people tend to disbelieve organizational leaders. Employee influence communicated as a patronizing, do-good activity is doomed.

Leadership demands truth and clarity. Emphasizing empowerment for both hourly employees and management will appear contradictory to many. Entering the 20th century, management models were authoritarian. The use of authority entering the 21st century will be influenced by the events of the past 100 years. The contribution of the labor movement in the early part of this century was an essential corrective step. Of course, the pendulum has swung sometimes and tyranny has come from the opposite direction — from labor. Pendulum swings seem inevitable.

Perhaps a functional use of authority cannot emerge until after a history of the old authoritarianism, followed by a needed rebellion against that tyranny, with labor union successes and excesses, and then extreme permissive kinds of management styles where nobody knew who was in charge or who was making the decisions.

Without experiencing the above, it is difficult to understand a goal-oriented, humanistic leader who gives people influence and recognizes that it is absolutely essential to give authority to someone for certain functions in order to “make it work.” (See Factor 4.) Our history had to be what it was in order for management and labor, in this new balance, to empower each other and give up the destructive, adversarial relationship.

The Future Organization

The organization of the future must achieve the balance we are describing here. The leader must wield strong enough authority to create a participative culture, which paradoxically creates a loyalty that enables followers to march toward organizational objectives in a way unimagined by the “old school” authoritarian bosses.

I was part of a volunteer organization in which medical doctors and other people with high social status followed the lead of a 22-year old who said, “Okay, to get this room ready for this activity, we need the wastepaper baskets emptied.” And they would do it because they wanted to make it work. They were not there to fulfill their status needs but out of a concern for the larger mission of that particular organization. An empowered organization breaks through the bureaucracy of status and encourages initiative from whomever sees what needs to be done.

The opportunity to do productive work in a humane organization, with clarity of direction, is a privilege denied to many. And it is the most powerful motivating and self-esteem enhancing force known. It also leads to bottom-line results. However, a differentiated leader with such clarity is rare. Throughout this book I will refer to the difference between a differentiated and an undifferentiated leader. It is difficult to comprehend an organization with clarity and without a differentiated leader.⁷ Before moving to Chapter Two, I recommend that you read the reference in Appendix B defining these terms.

What Follows in This Book

Chapter Two consists of a simple, self-scoring instrument that identifies the 25 key Factors that impact performance. Also, I have outlined four basic steps for a manager to take to help the work team improve its performance.

Chapter Three is a how-to manual. There I illustrate with action ideas how successful managers have balanced their authority with employee influence in the 25 key areas. The leaders’ clarity about the context that they intend to create is of paramount importance. Of course, external factors also impact success. The economic scene, national work ethic, distribution of wealth and privileges, and market position of the product being produced are critical. Also, a manager with about 10 employees in a small business certainly is more influential than one in a large organization where his/her group is one of many. Depending on the situation, the manager may have varying degrees of influence with his/her employees. But whatever your internal or external situation, we invite you to create a top-flight organization. The ideas in Chapter Three could help you do that.

Because I believe that survey feedback is a powerful tool for affecting change, I have included instructions in Chapter Five for using the instrument in Chapter Two as a survey feedback tool. Two versions of the instrument are included. The longer version is more descriptive of the Factors. Also, I have included a chapter, Focus on System Change, Not Individua...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Cycle Toward Creating and Maintaining a High Performance Team
• Chapter One: Empowerment and High Performance
• Chapter Two: The 25 High Performance Factors
• Chapter Three: Action Ideas for the 25 Factors
• Chapter Four: Focus on System Change, Not Individual Change
• Chapter Five: Survey Feedback — Turning Data Into Action
• Appendices