Guest Column: Lessons from the Empowerment Battlefield

During the late 1980s, I was working for a fast-growing, mid-sized pharmaceutical company in the US Midwest. I was a young, inexperienced manager at the time, still learning the principles of good leadership. The head of manufacturing, with an ambition to create a world-class manufacturing organization, decided that self-directed work teams (a strategy originally developed in Britain following World War II to enhance economic productivity) was one of the key strategies to accomplish this objective.

There was soon a small army of expert consultants engaged to advise and guide us on this journey. I was fortunate to be selected as a member of the initiative’s design team. The team was tasked with the Herculean job of developing a new organizational model and an implementation plan. This would be my first experience with a major workforce empowerment and culture change agenda. It would prove to be an experience I would leverage for the next 35 years of my career.

Workforce Empowerment

I’ll pause my story here for a brief overview of workforce empowerment. Simply put, empowerment is providing employees with the autonomy, tools, and trust to make decisions that impact their roles and the organization. It requires a shift from the more traditional directive or micromanagement style to fostering a sense of ownership and accountability. The essential factors of empowerment include:

• Building trust
• Establishing clear goals, guidelines, and expectations
• Investing in coaching, development, and new skills
• Ensuring strong communication and feedback loops
• Providing flexibility in work arrangements
• Ensuring effective recognition and incentives

Outcomes

The desired outcomes of empowerment is a workforce that is more motivated, inspired, and confident. It is a workforce that trusts its leadership, has greater creativity, and makes a bigger impact on the company’s bottom line. A study of over 7,000 employees who did not feel empowered rated at the 24th percentile of engagement, whereas those with a high level of empowerment came in at the 79th percentile.1 This major difference highlights the impact of empowerment on engagement.

A recent survey showed engagement driven by empowerment significantly improved several key operating indicators. These included employee satisfaction, quality, safety, absenteeism, productivity, and profitability. The organizational strategy of self-directed work teams mentioned before raises the concept of empowerment to its highest level. For years, advocates of this strategy have promoted its benefits of added flexibility, better problem-solving skills, and greater productivity.

Implementation

Our team took a “top down, bottom up” approach, starting with meeting key stakeholder groups and listening carefully to their input. Some groups were excited and optimistic, whereas others were concerned and pessimistic about the probability of success. There were no unexpected responses for a major change effort. After months of work, management endorsed our plan and began implementation. The plan was both complex and comprehensive. The central elements involved:

• Substantial delayering of the organization with a redefinition of supervision and management roles
• End-to-end process work team structure
• An extensive training program aligned with a new pay-for-skills compensation system
• Broader information sharing with new performance metrics
• Major delegation of responsibility, accountability, and decision making-to the teams (the plan we developed was very ambitious, and we eventually discovered it was too ambitious)

The failure rate for this type of change effort is high. Finding the right balance between autonomy and control is not easy. And of course, there’s always the inherent resistance to change and desire to maintain the status quo. Unfortunately, our project would end up being one of the failures, not one of the successes.

Lessons Learned

The after-action report identified numerous reasons for the failure, but these could be distilled down to just four central mistakes. First, there was a lack of clear leadership because of front-line supervision and middle management confusion over the new roles. (What does it mean to be a coach and facilitator vs. a more traditional supervisor and manager?) Second, there was internal and external sabotage to the teams. Some managers just gave lip service to the effort and went on doing things as they always had. There were team members who didn’t want to take on the added accountability and responsibility because of fear, or not wanting the burden of too much additional work.

Third, it was difficult within the teams to hold people accountable, and conflicts and power struggles arose. And finally, one of the business cases for self-directed teams is the economics. This involves doing more with less, including labor. This was a difficult challenge for the teams to handle because it meant fewer staff working more. As a result of these issues, operational performance progressively declined, and management was ultimately forced to abandon the project after a lot of time and money spent.

Not all strategies are successful. Sometimes these strategies provide the most valuable lessons. In this case, the manufacturing organization learned from the failure, applied those learnings, bounced back quickly, and went on to do bigger and better things. As for me, I took away some valuable leadership lessons.

First, one size doesn’t fit all. Although we had visited several companies with successful implementations, this strategy was not right for our culture. Second, in any change initiative there will be people who are just not on board and never will be. It’s vital to quickly identify them and take decisive action. If you don’t, they will be a detriment to the organization going forward. Third, good management is good management regardless of the circumstances. Whether organized in self-directed teams or a traditional hierarchy, clarity of direction, coaching, and development are always essential. There’s no substitute. In this experience, I’ve learned more from failure than success. “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing,” said Henry Ford.