You Don't Have to Give Up Power in Order to Empower
If the buck stops with you, how do you reconcile with the fact that you want your people to own their role and feel empowered to use their creative thinking within that role? I've got good news: you do not have to give up your power in order to grant power to others.
It's easy to get into a fixed mindset and see power like a zero-sum game. If you hand off thinking to someone else, it can feel like your slice of the pie got smaller. Handing off might also feel irresponsible the outcome is ultimately riding on you. But not only is a fixed pie not an accurate model for power, leaders who don't or can't empower others end up feeling stretched thin and burnt out. Oh, and their results aren’t as good.
Recently, a client was hesitant to ask a stakeholder group further down in the hierarchy what they thought of the plan the leadership team was developing. They didn't want to ‘open a can of worms’ and give people the illusion that the solution we were designing could be riddled with bullet holes.
But we stepped back and essentially said, "Wait a minute. What if they do find a way to improve our solution that we haven’t yet considered? If it's actually better, we would of course want to use it. And if they don't have any suggestions, the gesture alone of engaging them is valuable."
I've written before on decision rules, and essentially we are talking about the leader maintaining an authoritative decision-making process. You empower others to offer input and contribute their thinking to the problem, but you remain the final decision maker. You are the guard rails within which messy, creative problem solving and opinion sharing can happen.
Leaders sometimes worry that if they empower others, they then have to follow those others. What you're basically doing is giving others the power to influence you. You're opening your mind.
You are not giving up your power, however, because you still get veto power in the end. It’s just that, in the meantime, you can go do some listening.
