Empowerment is a strong tool to get your employees more activated and motivated. They will get more productive and will be more valuable for your company. Giving autonomy is a good way to start, but when your are giving your employees more responsibilities, someone is going to lose power. Status is one of the most important motivational factors since the beginning of time. Being on top of that pyramid.
To make this work both ways, start working on that relationship between your managers and your employees. Managers play a critical role in the process of employee empowerment, the successful transfer of power and authority to lower organizational levels may depend in large part on managers’ belief that subordinates can be trusted (Burke, 1986; Manz & Sims, 1993).
Managers will empower their colleagues only when they will be positive about (Liden & Graen, 1980):
It's all about knowing each other. When your management plays a crucial role in empowering your staff (and they will), start by spending some quality time between management and staff. Play a game together where skills, trust and working together are the key to success.
Defuse a bomb!
Play this game each morning as a team before the standup: www.keeptalkinggame.com. You have to defuse a bomb as a team. Start by creating a team where the management and staff are responsible for achieving this goal. It’s important that everybody’s input is equally divided to achieve the goal. Equality is the most important starting point of this game.
One player has to take actions to defuse the bomb and the others read the manual and give advice what to do. Trust is important, but also equality is key to success. Each morning change the one who is doing the actions and the advisors, so everybody experienced each role.
This game will help you to bond, give each other insights in what everybody's skills are and will create more trust within the team. Your lives depend on it! In the end, management will create more understanding of the employee skills and are more willing to empower them!
Liden, G. and Graen, G. (1980) Generalizability of the Vertical Dyad Linkage Model of Leadership.
Burke (1986) Leadership as empowering others.
Manz, C. and Sims, H., 1993, Leading workers to lead themselves: The external leadership of self-managed
work teams, Administrative Science Quarterly, 32, pp.106-128.
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