Jeff Petkevicius asks:
>If you were attending a four hour workshop on the subject of empowerment
>and empowering workers in all levels of an organization, What would make
>the workshop valuable to you? What would you want covered and how would
>you like it presented, small groups, individual exercises etc.?
I have a question in response to this one: Who is the workshop for? I
hope it is for top management. I hope it is a workshop about how to
create an environment that releases the power of everyone in the
organization rather than constraining people. I have heard it said, and I
think I agree, that the idea of empowerment suggests that top management
retains power and doles it out as appropriate, which also suggests they
can take it back when they want. For true empowerment to take place, we
need to move away from this perspective.
My own sense is that if you raise top management's consciousness of the
idea of the organization as a system and the full implications of that,
then creating a culture where people can take full advantage of their
abilities and skills to contribute to the organization will naturally
emerge. I don't think you can ever help people become empowered in a
workshop. It has to be cultural.
But if you want some ideas for your workshop, look at what's going on that
frustrates people and holds them back from performing well. It is often
the necessity for various executives to approve requests and sign off on
new ideas and so on. Such checkpoints often add little value and lots of
costs. This ultimately compromises the organization's ability to satisfy
customers. If you can remove the causes of employee frustration, you will
at the same time be creating an empowering environment. Another way of
saying this is try to find all the non-value adding activities that go on
in the organization. If you get rid of these, you will take a giant step
toward empowering people. So maybe that could be the theme of your
workshop. But again I would say you have to get top management to buy
into developing cultural values where empowerment just makes sense as the
intelligent thing to do.
John Woods
jwoods@execpc.com
--John Woods <jwoods@execpc.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>