2.3.2 Empowerment

​TALENT
Attracting, motivating, and retaining employees are among the frequently mentioned reasons. For companies competing fiercely for every talent in markets where labour is scarce, empowerment is a significant factor. Especially the younger and more highly qualified talents today want much more than just a secure job with good compensation. They want to realise themselves, implement their own ideas and work in a self-determined way. In choosing a job, they carefully evaluate the working environment, the corporate culture and the behaviour of the company’s leadership.

​AGILITY
In the era of digitalisation, the rate of change is increasing rapidly, product life cycles and development cycles are shortening radically, and disruption and spontaneity are on the rise. This scenario, known as VUCA (variability, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) in the professional world, requires companies to radically rethink and realign traditional processes across various domains. The agile working environment has emerged as a prominent solution in this regard. Decisions should be made within small agile teams directly on-site. Reaction speeds are expected to increase, and the degree of self-organisation must increase accordingly. Without empowerment, such working environments cannot be successfully realised.

​CUSTOMER CENTRICITY
In these fast-paced times, product quality and customer value must be kept in mind appropriately. Customer experience should not be compromised by the dynamics and changes. Therefore, the shorter the change cycles become, the closer the company must get to its customers regarding specific products or changes. In the agile world, the direct connection with the customer takes place in a decentralised and extensively self-organised manner within the respective teams of the organisation. This is hardly possible without well-functioning empowerment.

​LEARNING
In a self-organised organisation with strong empowerment, the degree of content-related penetration into individual topics is greater than in the case of work models with delimited subject areas. This increases the absorption of knowledge and the understanding of cause-effect relationships and interdependencies in the product, process, project, or company. In addition, greater personal responsibility usually leads to greater interest in the interrelationships and better results of one's own work. Ultimately, professional interactions among individuals in the organisation are elevated, resulting in a greater transfer of knowledge. Self-organised work inevitably leads to self-organised learning.

​TALENT MANAGEMENT
Empowerment cannot be prescribed, and not everyone is inclined to take on more responsibility or is interested in familiarising themselves with new content or tasks. It is important to identify suitable talents and use and develop them in the right way so that empowerment and self-organisation contribute to success rather than to stress and frustration. This necessitates the presence of a 'talent management' approach in the company or, at the very least, a thorough understanding and management of the talents residing in the organisation. There are detailed explanations on the topic of talent management in Enterneering^®.

​DELEGATION
Proper delegation is a key element of successful empowerment. It is important to clearly communicate not only the task but also the expectation of success or outcome and the timeframe for realisation of that outcome. Furthermore, foreseeable obstacles or interactions within the company should be adequately addressed. Depending on experience and maturity, delegation can be of different degrees. For instance, a lower degree of delegation involves assigning a task to an employee to develop a solution proposal, which is then discussed and decided upon with the manager. A higher degree of delegation corresponds to a 'leading by objectives' approach, where only the desired result is explained, the framework conditions are agreed upon and the way of implementation is decided by the employee. However, it is not only the maturity of the employees that is decisive in successful delegation but also the talent and maturity of the manager. Delegating requires letting go and doing so in an appropriately consistent manner. Many leaders tend to micromanage intensively. Overcoming this in the long run is one of the essential prerequisites for successful delegation.

​FEEDBACK
Regular exchange of information is an elementary component of empowerment in self-organised structures. Binding deadlines should be just as firmly anchored as the self-image of spontaneous feedback when needed. Feedback is not one-sided and should not be equated with control or reporting. Feedback within the context of delegated tasks should be characterised by the exchange of mutual expectations, assessments, opinions and suggestions. The aim is also to foster a shared understanding of expectations, requirements and constraints. Successful feedback is characterised by building trust, enhancing transparency and facilitating active expectation management.

​MACRO-MANAGEMENT
Here, macro-management refers to the work done towards empowering the organisation. Empowerment only succeeds when the transfer of responsibility and autonomy is accompanied by the adequate empowerment and equipping of the organisation. Instead of micromanagement, the attention of the leader or the management must be focussed on providing or procuring the right resources (qualification, quality) in the required amount (quantity) and at the right time.