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Two Common Traits of Great
Leaders and Managers |
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They have a desire to employ people with greater skills or knowledge
than they themselves possess
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They have an ability to develop people into leaders themselves
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Contemporary Management
Involves All Levels of the Organization in the Following Functions: |
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Determining corporate vision,
mission,
objectives, and long-range goals
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Analyzing and building organizational structure
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Organizing meaningful jobs related to the company's
mission
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Main Benefits of Employee
Empowerment |
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Releases the individual wisdom, creativity and energy
of employees
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Facilitates
teamwork and harnessing of collective power
of employees
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Changes the managers' mind-set and leaves them with
more time to engage in broad-based thinking, visioning, and nurturing.
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under construction |
Why Employee Empowerment?
Involvement in an organization is no longer a one-way street.
In today's corporate environment a manager must work towards engaging
organization forcefully enough to achieve its objectives. New
knowledge-based enterprises are characterized by flat hierarchical
structures and multi-skilled workforce. Managers assume more
leadership and
coaching tasks and work hard to provide employees with resources and
working conditions they need to accomplish the goals they've agreed to. In
brief, managers work for their staff, and not the reverse.
Empowerment is the oil that lubricates the exercise of
learning. Talented and empowered human capital is becoming the prime
ingredient of organizational success. A critical feature of successful
teams, especially in
knowledge-based enterprises, is that they are invested with a
significant degree of empowerment, or decision-making authority.
Equally important, employee empowerment changes the managers'
mind-set and leaves them with more time to engage in broad-based thinking,
visioning, and nurturing. This intelligent and productive division of duties
between visionary leaders, focusing on emerging opportunities, and empowered
employees, running the business unit day to day (with oversight on the
leader's part) provides for a well-managed enterprise with strong growth
potential.
Participatory Management
Cross-level work groups can contribute a lot to corporate
decision-making and
planning. Participatory management means seeking employee's opinions
and actions whenever possible and keeping an open mind to the suggestions
and criticism they offer. Participatory management offers the following
benefits2:
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It is a powerful
motivator - you own what you do and where you work
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Better decisions result - a synergy effect from collecting
more inputs
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A trusting climate is created - it is important for all
employees to know not what is being done, but why
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Employees understand their jobs better - as they understand
better how they fit into achieving the overall corporate goals
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Progress towards
corporate goals is accelerated - through
frequent discussions about how the work is progressing
Employee Ownership of Quality
Quality is not something that management can mandate or
dictate. To gain employee commitment to the
quality
process, your company's management, control, and reward systems must be
modified to give employees greater responsibility and opportunity to become
quality and
customer oriented and motivate them to strive for
continuous improvement. Give ownership for quality to your employees,
elicit and listen to their ideas about improvement and empower them to make
more decisions and perform tasks that are quality related.
Building and Nurturing Customer Relationships
Creating a work environment that encourages
rapid response to customers' needs and attentive follow-through is the key
to leveraging the power of the service-profit
chain. This is only possible when people are empowered to
make decisions and are
motivated
to solve
problems. By encouraging employees to go beyond the literal boundaries
of their jobs - to make suggestions for improvement - you gain not just a
part, but the full potential of their contributions to the business.
Delicate Balance between Authority and Employee
Empowerment
Effective
leadership demands a delicate balance between laissez-faire and overly
controlling styles. "Tilting too far toward a majority vote democracy, the
manager becomes reluctant to exercise sufficient force necessary to propel
the company toward its goals," says Harvard Business School professor
Michael Beer. "This creates an organizational bereft of leadership. In such
an environment, management fails to coordinates the various components of
the enterprise and, in turn, fails to harness the positive factors inherent
in the conflict between operating units (such as credit versus sales or
technology versus human resources). Ironically, what appears to authorize an
exceptional level of personal freedom and flexibility turns out to be a
trap. Call it the paradox of empowerment3."
Case Study: General Electric
Some years ago, in locations throughout GE, local managers
were operating in an insulated environment with Chinese walls separating them, both
horizontally and vertically, from other departments and their workforce.
Employee questions, initiatives, and feedback were discouraged.
In the new
knowledge-driven economy, Jack Welch, CEO, General Electric, "viewed
this as anathema. He believed in creating an open collaborative workplace
where everyone's opinion was welcome3". He wrote in a letter to shareholders:
"If you want to get the benefit of everything employees have, you've got to
free them - make everybody a participant. Everybody has to know everything,
so they can make the right decisions by themselves"...
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