Empowering the Workforce, or Not?

Empowering the workforce is essential for a number of reasons, including 1. continuous improvement and 2. achieving good results in times of a crisis.

A company's email going down is a crisis in today's culture. It staying down for hours and hours is a major crisis. If the company depends upon email for transfer if "lots" of information (pages and pages of attachements), and the email is down for 2 days, the crisis is of huge proportions........IF, the people doing the work are not empowered.

If people are empowered, the crisis is minimized, they will work through such a problem (the crisis) and find ways to achieve good results. 

How do you know if people are not empowered? You'll hear and observe certain things during a crisis. Such as;

• Let me go ask if we can do that
• We don't like faxes, we want it emailed (remember, email is down)
• I know there is an upload available though the internet but we don't want to use it
• Some people seem happy that the crisis is happening (they think, management just thinks they have things under control!!)
• Apathy
• This is the way we've always done it, can you overnight the documents?
• After being shown a work-around they say something like -  you are the only ones that knows how to do it and we want everyone to be treated the same, so no....we can't do it again even though we are still having problems
• Let me go ask if we can do that

Dennis Bakke, in his book Joy at Work, tells how a seperate manager should take over during a crisis period. This manager, and all locations and job functions had someone such as this identified, would take over, get things out of the crisis mode and go back to his/her normal job.

Regardless of whether or not we have a crisis manager, as leaders and followers we must lead and follow courageously. To be courageous the team, the workers, must be empowered to do their very best job.

To that end....