Page 68 - Just Promoted A 12 Month Road Map for Success in Your New Leadership Role

Entering the Organization 53

■ Suggestions will be appreciated and rewarded, even if not accepted.
■ People can be trusted with responsibility.
■ People are respected for their ideas and judgment.
Personal empowerment assumes that each employee has the ability and the
will to do the job as well as he or she knows how. When the manager removes
barriers to effective performance and creates a supportive climate, most
employees will improve their performance, and some will achieve new levels
of results.
The goal of personal empowerment is a sense of commitment and align-
ment, a feeling that members of the organization have an investment in, and
can affect, the success of the organization. This sense of “psychological own-
ership” engenders feelings of responsibility, concern, and interest among the
employees. We invest energy, commitment, and concern in things for which
we feel ownership, in our children, spouses, homes, careers, jobs, and ideas.
When employees feel that the organization is not theirs, that it is not a part
of them, they feel only minimum responsibility and often do the job only as
it is given to them. The problems and difficulties are someone else’s—who-
ever owns the organization therefore owns the responsibility. If employees
think the organization is yours (as the leader), they will believe that the prob-
lems are yours, challenges are yours, failures are yours, and successes are yours.
Their actions will say “You folks had better do something about this.”
Some leaders want to be the people who get the glory, have the power, take
the responsibility, have all the answers, and know all the details. A mayor of a
large U.S. city was a leader who did very little work to empower his staff and
rarely deliberated with his aides or consulted with other politicians, city coun-
cil members, or ward leaders. When asked questions, he rarely deferred answers
to the people on the job. He personally cut every ribbon and made every impor-
tant public appearance and every important announcement. He gained a rep-
utation for shooting from the hip (and being wrong and often contradictory).
He was seen as aloof and isolated from both those who worked for him and
those who supported him. He increasingly viewed the job as his job, his city,
and his responsibilities, and he saw the city’s problems as his problems.
As his top people sensed the erosion of their authority, their sense of own-
ership eroded. Some left the administration, others marked time. Responsi-
bility for making things happen increasingly fell to the mayor, and he became
personally less effective as his organization got weaker. He ended up with all