Beyond Empowerment
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An interesting article for our call center trainers and team leaders.
Smart educators understand that you can’t teach any¬one anything. Instead, if you want to pass on knowledge, you have to create an environment where students choose to learn. Then you reward them for their efforts.
Smart managers do the same thing: they don’t try to motivate their employees. Instead they create environments where people choose to motivate themselves. Then they reward them fully.
Here are four ways you can become this new breed of “environmental” manager:
Lay out the big picture
If knowledge is power, employees have generally been kept as weak as possible. They were given only as much information as they needed to do their particular jobs. Smart managers now see informed employees as their greatest asset. They encourage their employees to learn where their department fits in, how other groups work, why customers are important and how profits are made and distributed. When employees are not fully informed, they think and act out of ignorance, often undermining top management decisions because they don’t know the reasoning behind them. Give them knowledge and they become part of the solution.
At Motorola, a company that emphasizes the intellectual development of its people, all 130,000 employees are asked six questions every six months, one of which is “does any-thing stand in the way of you doing your job 100 percent?” Managers listen to the responses and do what’s necessary to improve the working environment.
Encourage your people to be leaders
The all-powerful, controlling boss is becoming extinct. Only 14 percent of 160 companies surveyed by Korn/Ferry International, an executive search firm, expect to have just one leader 10 years from now; 61 percent expect to have a team of leaders.
To prepare for this kind, of organization, it’s important that everyone thinks and acts like a leader, capable of assessing a situation, taking charge, and building consensus among others. This can only happen when you delegate your workload effectively. Make sure you regularly assign projects to help individuals grow in leadership.
Be tolerant of mistakes
Mistakes can be seen as stepping-stones or stumbling blocks, as opportunities or failures. It depends on the type of culture you’re creating. In a closed environment, conventional thinking is expected, risky decisions are avoided, and when mistakes happen, blame is spread around aggressively. In a more open organization, outside-the-box thinking is encouraged, risky decisions are evaluated (and, where appropriate, taken) and if things go wrong, people learn quickly and move forward.
Whether you as a manager are capable of creating this kind of risk-tolerant environment is a question of personality. Are you strong enough to tolerate, even encourage, innovation? Are you so hypersensitive that anything out of the ordinary gives you the jitters? Encouraging others to go down unconventional paths requires fortitude. Are you creating this kind of environment for your people?
Give personal feedback
We’re learning a lot about motivation these days. The popularity of Bob Nelson’s 1001 Ways to Reward Employees and 1001 Ways to Energize Employees (both on Business Week’s paperback best-seller list at the same time) indicates that managers actually do want to show appreciation to their employees.
Now we know from employees what form they want that appreciation to take. American Express recently asked American workers how they wanted to be rewarded for doing a good job: 46 percent said the reward they most wanted is personal feedback; 32 percent chose financial rewards and only 3 percent selected small gifts.
Personal feedback is the least expensive, most effective way to reward today’s employees. The form that it comes in (it can be as simple as “thanks for staying late yesterday” and “nice job on that report”) is not as important as the attitude behind it. Good personal feedback requires the most human of touches from the manager. Maybe that’s why there’s so little of it in the workplace. If you want to create a rewarding environment for your employees, fill it with sincere expressions of appreciation for a job well done.
When you ask CEOs what keeps them up at night, as Inc. magazine recently did, right up there at the top of the list is managing people. Maybe if they stopped trying to manage people and started creating environments where people could motivate themselves, everyone would be better off, and could sleep better at night.
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