Creating an Empowered Organization

By John A. Haas
Management Strategies Group

You started (bought or took over) this company. Your vision, capital, experience, knowledge, risk-taking and decision making brought you this far. You make almost all decisions, and most have been right. You've hired good people, and they've worked hard to help you succeed. Your attempts to delegate were disappointing--people weren't willing to "step up" and take responsibility. Now how do we get the company to the next level?

Know Your Current Culture

In fact, people may have learned that trying to make decisions is fruitless. If you frequently second-guess or reverse their decisions, they figure it's easier to just let you decide in the first place. "Delegating upward" is easier on everyone.

Now, you're realizing that your decision-maker management style prevents you from focusing on growth and future directions. Others are probably feeling frustrated as well.

Managing Change

As a system of interrelated and interdependent parts, changing one element of organization structure and process affects all other parts. Changing your role requires that others change theirs, in complementary and deliberate ways.

Your first (and most difficult) step is convincing yourself you can and will change your management approach, and clearly envisioning those changes.

Among the things to examine are:

• Where am I most capable, interested and needed to remain closely involved?
• Establishing measurable business goals and tracking success.
• Getting needed operating information in a timely manner.
• Defining major policy and strategic-level decisions I want to retain.
• Defining my primary focus as I delegate more (e.g. new products or services, acquisitions new technology, other investments)?
• How to convince staff to make individual and collective decisions to achieve established business goals.
• Reward systems that encourage consistent and integrated goal-oriented efforts.
• Consciously and consistently asking myself "is this something I should decide or delegate to my management team?"
• Monitoring all the above.

Expect initial steps toward creating an "empowered" culture will be met with great skepticism. People will say they've heard all this before, and won't believe you will behave any differently this time. Can you make the case to them and yourself that this time around we "better change?"

Winter 2002 - Volume 12, Number 1