WHY ORGANISATIONAL EXCELLENCE BEGINS WITH EMPOWERED PEOPLE

An organisation can have excellent systems, clearly defined processes and sophisticated performance measures, yet still struggle to achieve the results it is capable of achieving.
One reason that is often overlooked is the fact that the people doing the work have not been given enough opportunity to influence how the work is done.

In my earlier reflection, What 30+ Years of Business Excellence Taught Me About People, I argued that the brains within an organisation are not restricted to the boardroom. People at every level possess knowledge, experience and ideas that can contribute to organisational performance.

But recognising that intelligence is only the beginning. The real question is whether the organisation creates the conditions for people to use it. This is where empowerment becomes important!

Empowerment is more than Giving People Permission

Empowerment is sometimes treated as a management slogan. Organisations announce that their people are empowered, perhaps because employees have been given additional responsibilities or managers have delegated certain decisions. It is worth me pointing out here that delegation is not necessarily empowerment.

Giving someone responsibility without giving them the authority, information, resources or support required to fulfil that responsibility can create frustration rather than empowerment. Genuine empowerment means enabling people to make appropriate decisions and take meaningful action within a clear understanding of what the organisation is trying to achieve, and within allowable boundaries. It requires these boundaries, but with the consciousness that they should not become barriers.

People need to know what they can decide, what they are accountable for and when they need to involve others. Within those boundaries, they should have sufficient freedom to improve the work for which they are responsible. That distinction matters because organisational excellence is ultimately produced through work. And work is carried out by people.

The People Closest to the Work Often Know the Work Best

A person who performs a task repeatedly sees things that may be invisible to someone who reviews the process occasionally. They see unnecessary movement and notice what may cause or even become delays. They encounter recurring errors, and discover workarounds that have quietly become part of the process. They hear customer complaints, and know where information gets lost between departments.

Yet, organisations can sometimes expect these people simply to follow the established process rather than ask them how the process could be improved. This really is a missed opportunity!

The question should not always be, ‘Why did you not follow the process?’ Sometimes a better question is, ‘What is it about the process that made this problem occur at all?’

This does not mean that every employee suggestion should automatically be implemented. It simply suggests that the knowledge of people closest to the work should be treated as an organisational resource. This is one reason employee involvement has such an important place in continuous improvement.

Responsibility Without Influence Creates Frustration

There is a simple management contradiction that many organisations create without intending to do so. They hold people accountable for results but give them little influence over the factors that determine those results.

A team may be expected to meet a target while depending on another department for information. A supervisor may be held responsible for productivity while having no influence over equipment reliability. An employee may be expected to satisfy customers while being required to work with a process that repeatedly creates avoidable problems.

Accountability surely matters. However, accountability works best when people have a reasonable degree of control or influence over what they are being held accountable for. Otherwise, performance management can become a process of explaining failure rather than improving performance.

Empowerment helps to close this gap. When people have the authority to identify problems, propose improvements and take action within agreed boundaries, accountability becomes more meaningful. They are not merely being asked to deliver a result; they are being enabled to contribute to achieving it.

Empowerment Must Serve The Whole Organisation

There is, however, an important qualification. Empowerment should not mean that every part of an organisation simply optimises its own area. An improvement that makes one department more efficient can sometimes create additional work or problems somewhere else.

A purchasing team might reduce purchase price but increase maintenance or quality costs. A production team might increase output while creating difficulties for maintenance. One department might speed up its own process while creating a queue for the next department.

This is why empowerment must be connected to organisational priorities and the wider system. People should be encouraged to improve their work, but they also need to understand how their work connects with the work of others. This is an important principle of business excellence: the objective is not simply to make individual activities better. It is to make the organisation work better.

Empowered people therefore need context. They need to understand the organisation’s purpose, its priorities, its customers and the outcomes that matter. They need to see beyond their immediate task. When people understand the bigger picture, their ideas can become more valuable because they are thinking about the organisation rather than only their own corner of it.

People Need Permission to Question the Way Things are Done

Empowerment also has a cultural dimension. If employees are expected to improve the organisation, they must be able to question the way things are currently done. That can be uncomfortable sometimes.

Established processes often have history behind them. Someone introduced them for a reason. People may have become accustomed to them. Challenging them can therefore feel like challenging the people who created them. Organisational excellence, however, requires a willingness to ask difficult questions.

– Why do we do this?
– Why do we do it this way?
– What problem was this process originally designed to solve?
– Does that problem still exist?
– Is there a better way?

If people learn that asking such questions will make them unpopular, they will eventually stop asking. And when people stop speaking, management may receive the comforting impression that everything is fine.

Silence, however, is not necessarily agreement. Sometimes it is simply self-preservation.

This is why leaders have an important role in creating an environment in which people can raise problems, suggest alternatives and admit mistakes without fear of being humiliated.

Empowerment Requires Leadership

It may seem paradoxical, but empowerment requires strong leadership. A leader who says, ‘You are empowered,’ and then withdraws completely has not necessarily created empowerment. People still need direction, priorities, resources, coaching and feedback.

Leadership establishes the conditions within which empowerment can work. That includes being clear about what matters, making information available, removing unnecessary barriers and providing support when people encounter difficulties.

It also means resisting the temptation to take decisions back whenever something goes wrong. If every mistake results in senior management intervening and taking control, people quickly learn that initiative carries risk while waiting for instructions is safer.

Over time, the organisation can create dependency where it intended to create empowerment. The leader’s role is not to have every answer. It is to create an organisation in which more people are able and willing to find good answers.

From Employee Involvement to Continuous Improvement

This is one reason I have long valued approaches that involve employees directly in improvement. Quality Circles, for example, provide a practical way of bringing people together to examine problems in their work, understand causes and develop improvements.

The importance is not only in the individual improvement produced. There is also something powerful that happens when people see that their knowledge is valued and that they can influence the way work is done. They begin to see improvement as part of their responsibility rather than something imposed on them by management.

This is where employee engagement and continuous improvement meet. Engagement is not simply about whether people are happy at work. It is also about whether they feel that their contribution matters and whether they have an opportunity to influence outcomes.

An organisation that continually asks its people to do more without asking them how the work can be done better may be missing one of its most valuable sources of improvement.

Empowerment and Accountability Must Travel Together

There is a danger at the other extreme. Empowerment without accountability can become disorder.

People need freedom to act, but they also need clarity about the results they are expected to achieve and the standards they must uphold. The balance is important.

Too little empowerment and people become dependent on instructions. Too little accountability and improvement can become disconnected from results.

The objective is to create people who are both willing and able to take responsibility. That means giving people enough authority to act, enough information to make sound decisions, enough support to develop their capability and enough accountability to remain focused on results.

Excellence is Built by People Who Can Improve The Work

Organisational excellence is not created simply by designing better systems and issuing better instructions. It is created when the people within the organisation understand what matters, have the capability to contribute and are enabled to improve the work they do.

The brains within the organisation are not restricted to the boardroom. But if that intelligence is to become an organisational advantage, leadership must create the conditions for it to be used.

Empowerment is therefore not an HR initiative sitting alongside the ‘real’ business. It is part of how the real business gets better.
When people can identify problems, question assumptions, work with others, propose improvements and take appropriate action, an organisation gains something that no single executive can provide: the collective intelligence of the people who make the organisation work.

That is where employee engagement goes beyond a feeling, and it becomes participation. And participation, when connected to purpose, accountability and continuous improvement, can become a powerful foundation for organisational excellence.

A Question for Reflection

• How much of the knowledge within your organisation is actually being used to improve the way the organisation works?
• And what might become possible if more of your people were genuinely empowered to improve it?

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ABOUT KOLA OLUTIMEHIN

Kola Olutimehin (getKOLA) is a Business Excellence Consultant who helps organisations achieve operational excellence through effective leadership, employee engagement, continuous improvement and organisational transformation.

If you find these reflections useful, follow Kola Olutimehin (getKOLA) for more thoughts on leadership, business excellence, organisational transformation, achievement and purposeful growth. You may also subscribe to our newsletters here, and connect with Kola via getKOLA.

Kola Olutimehin is a Business Excellence Consultant, who assists organisations in the achievement of operational excellence. He is a Director with the International Lean Six Sigma Institute (ILSSI), the David Hutchins International Quality College (DHIQC), and the Global Excellence Team (GET).

The International Lean Six Sigma Institute (ILSSI) is one of the leading international Lean Six Sigma professional and certification organisations, recognised globally. Kola’s involvement with ILSSI, DHIQC and GET reflects his continuing work in business excellence, operational excellence, quality and continuous improvement.

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