An Empowered Organization

"An empowered organization is one in which individuals have the knowledge, skill, desire, and opportunity to personally succeed in a way that leads to collective organizational success."
- Stephen R. Covey, Principle-centered Leadership

It is practically impossible to open any current business magazine and not see a feature article about the importance of Talent. Talent recruitment, talent retention, creative talent. It's all one seems to hear about when talking about business and economic development. "Capturing the Creative Class" was business facilities recent feature article, "Who Will Lead" the feature in March 2008's Utah CEO magazine, and "Weathering the Perfect Storm, Utah's Tight Job Market Creates Turbulent Times for Needy Employers" from March's Business Utah Magazine are just three of the articles that have landed on my desk in the first few days of this month. Unemployment is going up, the economy is slowing down, yet everybody can't seem to stop talking about the need to find, retain, recruit, hire, and entice the most talented workers.

Perhaps as a reaction to a bit of a need to vent and also a need to evaluate this new trend of focusing so heavily on talent, I have personally felt the need to think about and put down in words what an empowered organization truly is.

Stephen R. Covey stated in his book Principle-centered Leadership, that "An empowered organization is one in which individuals have the knowledge, skill, desire, and opportunity to personally succeed in a way that leads to collective organizational success. I would like to add one word to this quote that is probably meant to be implied, but for the purpose of this article will try to highlight.

"An empowered organization is one in which individuals have the knowledge, skill, desire, and opportunity to personally succeed and grow in a way that leads to collective organizational success."

At a time when all the emphasis seems to be on finding, retaining, recruiting, hiring and enticing the best, I would argue that the emphases should be put back onto effective and empowering management, that, like Stephen Covey says, gives the individual the knowledge, skill, desire, and opportunity to personally succeed and grow in a way that collectively benefits the entire organization. The new leadership mindset is perhaps too much on the side of thinking that we live in a knowledge based economy, everyone in the organization should have a college degree, everyone understands business objectives and goals, and everyone should understand what they are supposed to do without being told what to do. This is perhaps true and in many circumstances not an unreasonable expectation, but there has to be an organizational foundation in place that can allow for an such an environment.

Education is a foundation alone. The more education you have, the bigger the foundation on which you can build. The important thing for managers is to make sure that employees have the resources and opportunities to build a career appropriate to the foundation that he has to build on. Just as individuals have a foundation created from education and personal development through daily activities and interests, so an organization has and should have a foundation.

An organizations foundation is made up of a vision and mission that needs to be articulated effectively and regularly throughout all levels of the organization. "Work without vision is drudgery", and without vision employees lack purpose, excitement, and motivation. Work becomes monotonous and meaningless because we don't understand the cause which we are a part of. Fundamental to every organization should be a strategic plan. Individual roles should be defined and expectations outlined. There needs to be both an operational function to assure consistency in procedures across the organization as well as a directive function that leads the organization as a whole.

Until management focuses on understanding the strengths and potential of the individual, and works to bring those traits out of the individual, an organization will never be fully empowered to deliver the best results possible.