Title: Staff
Empowerment the Key To Organizational Speed
Management and Executives are often afraid to let go of
power and decision making. In working with very diverse companies and
industries I have seen different levels of willingness to let go and empower
staff underneath them to make decisions not just to keep at speed with
consumers but also in making the highest-quality decisions. Many organizations
can be highly bureaucratic and the organizational structure itself can often
not lend itself to staff pushing basic decisions up hierarchically and this can
lead to staff feeling like they are not empowered or not trusted. Leaders can
also become content in making many of the decisions and often they are doing so
not being the expert on the issues or decisions themselves.
So the question
becomes how do we change the culture and process in streamlining approvals,
empowering and engaging staff. It is easy to implement a process and provide
guidelines with an approval matrix but often it is not that simple as in my
experience if there is no trust with the staff or if leaders are not willing to
delegate and trust colleagues and other staff with expertise in their areas it
becomes difficult to stay afloat. I have seen many well-intentioned managers and
executives become the blockage in approvals and often collateral can sit on the
end of a desk when it is time-sensitive and the ROI dwindles as valuable work
sits unapproved and not launched or implemented.
Change Management in regards to letting go of control for
management and executives can be very difficult. Often executives and
management want change but often do not want to change their actions themselves
and this can often mean processes and operational speed can be held up in many
of these cases. Time and again change management's essential in changing
culture and mindsets. Using influence to change actions of leadership and get
them too often play the role of a servant leader and coach can help accelerate
the maturity of an organization. Successfully changing leaders' roles and
mindset has been something I have taken pride in within my career to align them
with goals and destinations that the organizations are focused on reaching.
Empowering the people with the most information and closest
to issues to make decisions can help teams become more efficient and alleviate
pressures from management. A great perspective of this was Captain David
Marquet's command of a nuclear submarine and his empowerment of his crew. In
reality, the mind of one leader is not as strong as a whole team so it is, an
organization leverages its employees. Captain Marquet's video can be found
below:
The shift to empowering employees is one of the largest keys
to developing speed and often efficiency. Leaders often feel like they need to
take control to generate speed to market but this can often slow decision
making while reducing efficiency and quality. Leaders often are best-served
leveraging employees' strength and helping build trust to empower the
organization to help reach optimize their efficiency.
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