Empowerment at Every Level

A very accomplished and smart friend of mine tells this story: at the age of 19, he was working at a leading national department store as a stock assistant. Although he was hired into the position with little training, he worked hard to figure out the best way to stock hundreds of items in such a way that they would be organized and easily retrievable. Unfortunately, regardless of how hard he worked, his boss was never satisfied. The boss criticized him frequently for taking too long to do his job – never mind that there were no established guidelines for how the job should be done or how long it should take. In his performance review, the boss noted that my friend had been recommended by another department, and that therefore the boss would henceforth view that department's recommendations with skepticism.

Without even hearing the rest of the story, I knew where it had to be going. My friend is extremely intelligent and self-aware, and even in his 30s has accomplished things that others spend their whole lives trying to achieve.

Eventually, my friend got a new boss. The new boss encouraged him and gave him room to figure out the best way to handle his responsibilities. And what happened? My friend developed a system that the chain ended up deploying in several Orange County stores, realizing a savings of about a million dollars.

Now, dear reader, this may seem like an obvious lesson, particularly if you currently manage, say, a team of programmers. But remember – he was just a stock assistant, and a teenager at that. As yourself how much latitude you'd offer such an employee.

Give your people an opportunity to innovate – give them time to learn and room to fail – and the most amazing things will happen.

Empowerment and Innovation

Today I happened to be speaking to one of my team about empowerment and innovation. Probably I was influenced by an article I had picked up in the doctor's office earlier in the day*. The piece, written by management power-duo Jack and Suzy Welch, addresses the culture at Google (and, I hope, many other places), which “freely permits employees to work off-site and encourages them to use one day a week to explore any kind of ‘what-if’ project that interests them.”

Jack Welch, of course, is famous for his tenure at the head of GE, the nice folks who bring you so many Sunday morning talk shows. I've always thought of GE as a stereotypical, big, conservative, stodgy American corporation. But, when I focus on their core business, I realize that they are essentially a giant technology innovation engine (literally – if you don't believe me, check out their cool tutorial on jet engines.) Even their motto – “Imagination at Work” – sounds like it belongs to Disney... or perhaps Google. So it probably shouldn't have surprised me that Jack and Suzy had some interesting insights into empowerment and innovation.

“Empowerment,” they note, “is less likely to happen in bigger companies, which is the opposite of how it should be... Big companies do tend to be risk-averse, keeping decisions near the top, while small ones, and in particular startups—short on resources, formality, and time—tend to unleash every brain.” (Emphasis mine.) They go on to point out that big companies can afford the risk that empowerment represents, while smaller companies can often go under due to a single erroneous decision.

It's fairly obvious that real empowerment – and, frankly, real innovation – is more common in smaller companies. What is new is the recognition by a Fortune 10 CEO that this isn't the way it should be. The challenge for Google is to keep alive the spirit of innovation that got it to where it is now, a challenge shared by any big company that wants to avoid getting pantsed by a couple of PhDs in a garage in Palo Alto, Pasadena, or Cambridge.

Have I seen any evidence that big companies are getting this message? Outside of a few technology firms, no. Instead, thanks in part to Sarbanes-Oxley, individual empowerment is at a nadir. There is little room for creativity when all business problems are supposed to be addressed in the same, regimented manner, using the same, tired techniques, and requiring the same, groupthink approach. Requirements. Development. Unit testing. Integration testing. User acceptance testing. Migration. Celebratory lunch. Repeat.

Small, private firms are exempt from SOX, and have not yet developed the culture of risk avoidance shared by so many large public companies. Employees are less likely to have HR-prescribed, set-in-stone job descriptions, and auditors are unlikely to drop by to ask for copies of approved change controls. As a result, individuals have much more room to innovate; indeed, they are generally strongly incented to do so by stock options whose value they can thereby impact directly.

Until big companies can find a way to create space within their latticework of regulations, policies, and procedures for employees to innovate, they will continue to earn their reputation as places where cool ideas go to die.

*) Quick question: if you have an 8am appointment, and the office opens at 8am, shouldn't you actually see the doctor well before 8:30? Because that's when I saw him. Sheesh.

More Staff, Fewer Managers?

When I saw the title of the Wall Street Journal article, "Overseeing More Employees With Fewer Managers," I was sure I'd hate it. To me, more employees and fewer managers means less time spent with each employee — less time to:

• Mentor
• Provide and receive feedback
• Identify strengths and find a way to leverage them
• Work with a struggling employee to return him to productivity and success

To my mind, those are key reference points in any decision concerning team size. But is there an upside to this philosophy? Are managers able to increase their "span of control" (more on that phrase in a future posting) and still end up with perfectly acceptable, people-centered results?

The article describes a Pepsi subsidiary in which "workers have been briefed on company goals and processes so that they do more themselves to keep production running smoothly." The piece goes on to explain that "[n]ew pay systems reward productivity, quality, service and teamwork while penalizing underperformance."

So, do empowered employees require less personal attention? Empowerment is certainly compatible with — even a requirement of — people-centered leadership. But does empowerment dilute the role of the leader, as the snack-food company would have us believe?

Maybe, but I'm skeptical. Deprived of individual guidance, we will expect employees to use their knowledge of "company goals and processes" to grow, thrive, and make good decisions. Well, I'm in favor of keeping your employees up to speed on those things; I'm just not sure that, in and of itself, acquainting your employees with the corporate mission statement constitutes leadership.

Of course, if the staff aren't as productive as we'd like, there's still no need to resort to manager intervention: the "pay systems" will make things right. That will sure save a lot of time on mentoring, intervention, and personal support.

In technology, we look to our teams to offer creative, practical, and innovative solutions to business problems. Leadership is critical to making that dynamic work. The WSJ article notes that Sun Microsystems - certainly a major technology innovator, notwithstanding its current precarious financial position - prefers to keep teams on the small side.

As long as we, as leaders, have something to offer our employees — as long as we can help them overcome challenges, meet their goals, and realize success in their professional lives — we owe it to them, and to the companies that employ us, to ensure that we have sufficient capacity to do so. Ultimately, employee empowerment, however laudable a goal that may be, is no substitute for the individual support and attention of an effective and dedicated leader.