It's the word of the moment, but who knows what it means?

Chatting this morning with the manager of our favourite local restaurant, I was recounting a story I read in Geoff Burch's blog a couple of days earlier. It clearly struck a chord, especially when I mentioned the buzzword of the moment.

He's had plenty of it, too, according to his senior managers, and so have his staff. Or at least his managers have been liberally distributing their version of it, especially in their many written missives...

Personally, I found the best way to get it was by not being managed by anyone. That is, by leaving my job and opting for self-employment.

It strikes me that 'empowerment' is something you can only give by preparing and training someone and then standing back. Leaving them empowered to do what you pay them to do, and with a sense that at least some of the decisions they make are their decisions, freely made.

They'll feel better about themselves and their role, and you'll get better results as a consequence. If your training and preparation is any good, you should be delighted to let your people get on with things, not be paranoid that they might do things a little differently to the way you would do them. Either you trust them (and thus yourself to pick them) or you don't.

That's not quite the way our restaurant manager's management think, apparently. And Geoff Burch found to his bemusement that some of his would-be clients don't think that way, either. When asked by Geoff what they wanted their staff to be empowered to do, one of them answered, 'To do as they're told'...

Not everyone wants to be self-employed, but not many people enjoy being micro-managed, either. It's a waste of training, a waste of time and money and a waste of thousands of people's hard-won skills and talents.

Roy Everitt, Writing For Results

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