Empowerment seems to be a catch phrase for just about every organization these days. The idea seems to be to push down the authority to make substantive decisions into the organization where it is presumed that both the expertise and need reside. Instead of bubbling up every decision to a few decision makers who may be somewhat disconnected from the details of the issue, it is thought to be desirable to empower the manager directly dealing with the issue to make the decision. In theory this is a pretty good model. The idea seems to run into trouble when there is not appropriate responsibility and consequence associated with that increased decision authority. Every action should have a consequence. Consequence is a word with a seemingly negative connotation, but it should not necessarily be that way. Maybe it stems from the old television show “Truth or Consequences” where if you failed to perform in some sort of an unpleasant challenge you had to face some sort of a potentially more undesirable or embarrassing second challenge or consequence. Maybe I am really dating myself by even admitting I am aware of that show. Growing up in New Mexico, where they have a city that actually renamed itself Truth or Consequences in honor of that show, it is difficult to not be aware of it. In any event consequences can be and should be both positive and negative in their behavioral reinforcement. That means that people who make good decisions should be positively reinforced, or rewarded, and people who make bad decisions should be negatively reinforced. Without this fundamental reward – risk structure, empowerment ideas will start to run into issues, and that will lead to seriously mixed messages for the organization, and ultimately poor business performance. Good leaders don’t allow mixed messages to be sent. Mixed messages demoralize and confuse the entire organization. It doesn’t take many mixed messages to achieve that undesirable goal. Let me give a couple of examples of how a lack of consequence associated with empowerment can and will affect an organizations morale and performance. I am going to pick on an easy topic, travel, since we are all familiar it. I will draw on some past experiences to illustrate how empowerment, responsibility and consequence need to go hand in hand in business. Some of this may sound familiar as well. Now in the empowered organization, people would be given the opportunity to travel based on their own or their manager’s decision of whether they needed to or not. They would also be responsible for the consequences of deciding to travel in the midst of a travel freeze. This would seem logical to me. If you decide to travel and get called about it, you had better have a very good reason for traveling when everyone has been told not to travel. However, I think many of us have seen the inevitably ensuing announcement where senior management issues the edict that even in the midst of the travel freeze, and with all the empowerment within the organization, all requests for travel will need to be signed by some member of senior management before they are approved. How is that again? A guideline has been issued. Those that adhere to the guideline should be positively reinforced and those that don’t should be negatively impacted. Those are the consequences. Why would a second, empowerment contradicting edict be issued? Obviously it has been issued because the first edict, the travel freeze, has not been effective at reducing travel. Those that have reduced travel have not been rewarded for their behavior, and those that continued travel have not been punished. There were no positive or negative consequences provided as a result of the empowerment. Since there were no consequences, the empowerment will have to be taken away in order to achieve the travel reduction, and hence the second edict. If you can’t successfully empower the organization to decide something as simple as when it should and should not travel, even within the confines of a “travel freeze” how can it be empowered to make other more complex business decisions. The answer is until there are consequences, both rewards and punishments associated with empowerment, it can’t. There are other variants of this empowerment issue and travel that can be used to illustrate the issue. There is also the “no travel unless visiting a customer” senior management edict. Again this action is focused on attempting to reduce costs and expenses be reducing discretionary travel. This is usually proclaimed by an executive at their regional, or worse, global staff review where they and the other senior managers from around the world have all flown in from different locations to discuss how to limit travel. The edict is then proliferated by other executives at their regional staff meetings where the same travel affect has occurred. I am not normally aware of many customers attending internal staff meetings, but I am aware, and usually so are many others, of a significant amount of travel by executives to attend these internal meetings, even when there is a no travel except to customers freeze on. This brings up a second important aspect associated with successful empowerment. If you want to empower employees to make what have previously been executive decisions, the executives will need to lead by example. If executives either do not or have not been adhering to the same rules that they want the organization to abide by, why are they surprised when the empowered organization behaves in the same way that the executives have been behaving? If the travel freeze means nothing to the senior management, it will also mean nothing to the empowered organization. Successful empowerment requires leadership that leads by example and lives by the same rules as the rest of the organization. It also requires that consistent consequences, both good and bad be implemented. If there is no benefit for good conduct and no negative reinforcement for bad, then empowerment will not align goals and behavior in the desired best interest of the organization. The result will be the forced fallback position of senior management trying to dictate policies that they themselves do not adhere to, and an overall reduced level of performance and morale in the organization.
Some groups in organizations travel more than other groups. Invariably the groups that travel actually want to travel less because it is not nearly as elegant an activity as people perceive, and those that do not travel frequently want to travel more because it breaks up the regular grind of being in the office. In times of financial stress one of the first things to be cut is discretionary spending. One of the first discretionary spending topics to be addressed is travel. When times are tough we have all been caught in the travel freeze.
