How to empower employees and encourage them to engage sincerely
It is the task of a leader to see and hear employees as whole persons, and when they develop them in this way, when they encourage their development, this presupposes the simultaneous building of their competencies and honing their character. Then they are empowered. When empowered, they feel responsible for questioning what makes sense and what doesn’t, and devising their own solutions.
In the first half of 2020, as part of an in-house leadership development project, we conducted an interesting study on what impresses leaders most about their own leaders and what they think shaped them as such on their own path to leadership. One response was repeated: 'The feeling of empowerment I felt working with my leader. The feeling that I was heard, understood, encouraged on my career path and developed as a person.'
When we asked them afterwards what this feeling of empowerment provided or enabled within them, with slight differences in answers, they told us: 'I felt that I really love what I do and where I work, that I can be successful and that I am always ready to go one step further. '
What they were talking about was the effect of empowerment on employees within the company and we described it as: loyalty, satisfaction, self-confidence, initiative and willingness to take responsibility. Looking at these characteristics, we agreed that empowered employees are engaged employees. Thinking about the many other stories I hear in my coaching practice, I believe that we can agree that we all want a culture that allows just that.
What about culture
Interviews with leaders within our project confirmed to us the importance of a sense of empowerment, its effects, and the connection to true engagement with all employees regardless of their position within the organization. But there are far more radical examples of cultures that continually encourage the true empowerment of their employees, by acting as a kind of incubator of individual and collective employee development at all levels.
Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey in their book entitled 'An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization ' talk about just such organizations. At first, the authors reveal a somewhat harsh reality: in most organizations, almost all employees engage in additional unpaid work - covering up their own shortcomings by trying to look their best with the sole intention of successfully managing others’ impressions of themselves.
The systems Kegan and Laskow Lahey are talking about work differently. In short, instead of covering up shortcomings, they are organized in a way to support their employees in overcoming their own limitations and see this as part of their contribution to a profitable business. People development is a part of every business process. In such a system, everyone, regardless of their formal function, has the role of engaged participants in building their own competencies and honing their own character. There is no observer.
Radical development cultures do not expect their employees to follow blindly set rules, but to question them instead. Moreover, to be empowered and engaged enough daring to oppose them for the purpose of changing something that may not have the current and does not create additional meaning. We can freely say that such organizations are convinced that they will really progress in terms of business potential and results only when they act deeply in accordance with the strongest motive for engagement and encouragement of the empowerment of their employees - their personal development.
What kind of development are we talking about
Often, in a corporate environment, we limit employee development to simply providing training to acquire the necessary skills. This education usually takes place once in addition to their work responsibilities, and not as part of them. If we place every employee development - figuratively speaking - outside their business environment, at a safe distance from their actual job, allowing the possibility of their business role being separated from personal growth and development, what usually happens in practice is that learning becomes another item on the already crowded to-do lists, for which there is too little time and consequently even less interest.
Radical cultures of development nurture a different kind of learning that does not happen elsewhere outside the organization, in some classroom on the side, once or only a few times a year. No, it happens continuously, in the heart of the company, at every level it is involved in the business process with a bold approach that says - it is ok to make mistakes at all levels, but not ok to ignore the mistake, to not talk about it and learn a lesson!
It is largely about the adaptive development of employees. What does such development mean in short? Ronald Heifetz, author of numerous books on leadership and director of the Center for Leadership at Harvard University, talks about learning through adaptive challenges, those that require us to change attitudes, beliefs, learned patterns of behavior and thinking, to deep-rooted values that shape our actions. If you thought these could be painful and risky challenges, you were right. If you thought that as such they could bring about a real change in one’s actions, empowerment, and engagement, you were also right.
Our human need to find a concrete answer for everything and a well-tested way of solving it, often draws our attention and limits our attention to a different type of development - the one that implies mastering the so-called technical challenges. Unlike adaptive solutions, technical challenges can be solved by existing expertise, eg by learning some new concrete skills. Adaptive solutions are as complex as one human being is and imply a deeper exploration of oneself to the level of what truly meaningfully drives, empowers, and makes us authentically engaged.
Radical or necessary?
Perhaps for some, this whole approach will seem too radical and complex. It is, in fact, both, but regardless of our view of such an approach, we cannot ignore the fact that the employees of the organizations Kegan and Laskow Lahey talk about in their book are extremely empowered in a culture of collective growth and development. And as such are authentically engaged through an invaluable feeling - the meanings they find in such a work environment.
As part of my own coaching practice, working with teams and individuals, I too often hear about topics of empowerment and engagement. How to empower employees and how to make them genuinely engaged.
My thinking always moves in the direction of the question of whether someone can and should be empowered and engaged at all, or is it about creating a context that is an incentive for everyone to feel that way. Inspired by such thinking, here’s the story I share with them most often: People are seekers of meaning. What they do for them must make sense in order for them to be fully engaged. When they sense meaning, they also feel their own purpose in what they do. The task of leadership is to see and hear them in their business roles as whole persons and when they continuously develop or encourage their development (and this presupposes the simultaneous building of their competencies and honing their character), they become empowered. When empowered, they feel responsible to question what does and what doesn’t make sense, and confidently create their own contribution.
No matter what level we are at in the organization, if we are not empowered or authentically engaged, we choose to commercialize our own contribution. The contribution becomes a transaction: the more I get, the more I give. And the value of what I gain over time becomes to me a very relative notion of a changeable character depending on a number of other elements that come to the fore when that space does not occupy a sense of meaning and purpose.
Looking at the long term, then is this whole approach too radical or too necessary?
Which is the task of a leader
The story of creating radical cultures of learning and development can seem overwhelming. What is the first step we can take as leaders to start the path to change? Peter Block, an American author and consultant in the field of organizational development, responds to it excellently. When asked how to change the world, he instructs us in one of his motivating quotes to start changing one room at a time, and when asked which room to start from, he says ‘from where you are’!
In the context of this story, we can say that leaders would best start the adventure of creating a culture of development by resolutely starting their own growth and development. The most challenging appraoch is the best - adaptive. As the quote from the aforementioned book says: enjoy the feast of your imperfections or continue to starve in your own ego.
Radical cultures of development are environments that do not allow starvation in one’s own ego. On the contrary, they ask us to deal with our own imperfections within adaptive development by, instead of covering them up with additional unpaid work, we work transparently to make us empowered in our own character and contribute to the common result.
Coaching level of consciousness
Education on coaching in its full potential represents adaptive development much more than technical development of skill acquisition. Adaptive development is one that changes the mental structure and creates a different view of oneself, others and the world - exactly what the participants of each quality coaching education emphasize as its most important outcome. By accepting the challenge of such development, leaders could at the very least create the different beliefs of their own needed to begin successfully building a radical culture of development as a building block for empowered and engaged employees.
The coaching mindset or, as I call this view of self, others and the world - the coaching level of consciousness - is the way of thinking for leaders who function as conscious coaches. Regardless of the fact that they will never deal with coaching professionally, they need the development of such a mental structure as an additional muscle for an overall better result, ie an overall strengthened leadership contribution. True leaders view their work from a coaching level of awareness as a true contribution to themselves and others. And it is through coaching education that they have the opportunity to become empowered and authentically engaged and, as such, a radical inspiration to others.
This article first appeared in Lider.media on 13th January 2021