How might your receptionist serve as a key source of information about how clients experience your firm?
Tag: empowerment
-
Question of the Week
Which option would encourage and empower more and better people to increase their involvement in accomplishing your goal?
The Question of the Week is offered to increase awareness of one’s personal leadership practices and encourage experimentation with creative alternatives.
-
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
Clay Shirky, The Penguin Press, New York, 2008.By now you are well aware of my penchant for writers who affirm, confirm and otherwise provide research to back up my own assertions.
As we at Bold Enterprises help you empower all people in your company, regardless of power, titles or places on the organizational chart, Clay Shirky examines the impact of the social dynamics taking place on the web on power and getting things done. With interesting results.
Interesting because it is not merely people who are already in a working relationship who are experiencing new effectiveness with the power of the web behind them. That’s old news.
But people who would never have had opportunity to meet much less collaborate are finding each other and making a difference in matters that are important to them.
Who’s choosing these matters of importance? No longer the bosses and others with positional power. They don’t even figure into the equation, except maybe as a source of resistance.
You and I are choosing these issues of personal and corporate importance and connecting with those who can help us and whom we can help as well.
You need to check out Here Comes Everybody and get acquainted with our world of change, chaos, unlimited relationships, and the strange and wonderful forms of effectiveness that are being created moment by moment.
-
Toxic at the Extremes
Operating at any extreme rarely works well.
Empowerment and accountability as extremes are toxic. As partners they are generative.
Authority and resources for making an individual contribution along with expectations for achieving specific results.
Empowerment alone is a recipe for chaos, diluted focus, and the tyranny of individual entitlement agendas. Accountability alone is a recipe for abusive manipulation, unrealistic and unfair standards, and begrudged work efforts.
But get ready for an explosion of energy, engagement and results when you hold empowerment and accountability in creative tension with each other.
Claudia and I are discussing this right now in our current podcast series on Influencing Others. Be sure to click on the player in the right column and listen in.
How do you combine the extension of authority and resources to empower individual contribution along with the expectations and accountability to achieve specific results?
-
Listen In -> Influencing Others #1: Empowerment and Accountability
The solution is a tension. When it comes to influencing others, there are no shortcuts.
If you were hoping for tips on how to manipulate people into doing much more for much less and then thanking you for the privilege, you’ll probably be disappointed with our current podcast series on Influencing Others.
Join us as we discuss a powerful and inseparable relationship between empowerment and accountability. A total commitment to results and achieving the mission of the organization on the one hand, and a total commitment to trust and creating a place where people engage fully and bring everything they have to the table on the other.
Over the next four weeks, we will be discussing:
- Empowerment and Accountability
- Clarity and Buy-in to the Mission
- Clarity and Commitment to the Team
- Organizing for Trust and Results
Listen in.
-
Who is Your Mentor?
To whom do you look when you need a leg up, a wise word, honest feedback, a generous dose of encouragement, or a safe sounding board?Not in the formal sense of a named “mentor/mentee” relationship structure, though those are wonderful. But when you find yourself looking around for someone who’s “been there before,” who do you find yourself turning to?
Who, before offering any advice, is simply on your side? Who believes in you and has an oddly generous interest in leveraging their experiences, relationships, and resources for your benefit?
I’ve had such people in my life in the past. Maybe I am wistful for someone similar now. It seems to me, though, that such figures are too few and far between.
Whenever I find myself feeling others should be doing something they’re not, I have to ask myself what I’m doing. Who do I come alongside and give the gift of encouragement, acceptance, availability and any resources that might enhance or enable their success?
And so the original question gets reversed: How do you come alongside and empower others?
-
Trust the Employees or Trust the Controls?
What would happen if you made additional tools and support available to your employees without dictating to them how or for what to use them?
See what IBM experienced when it made various publishing and broadcasting tools available to its employees and trusted them with the uses. Read Eric Eggertson’s insights into how building a corporate “culture of trust and authenticity” will result in unanticipated creativity and buy-in.
People are not an interchangeable commodity whose energies we exploit as long as we can get away with it. They are our primary asset, a source of infinite energy and creativity, IF we come to terms with the reality that core to their (our) motivation is the opportunity to contribute and make a difference.
Try an experiment of your own and see what amazing new improvements, initiatives and/or innovations emerge from your team.
On your side.
