The Empowered Manager

You can find out more about Peter Block, his books and services at www.PeterBlock.com and at www.DesignedLearning.com.

Interview overview

• An introduction to Peter Block and his work.
• What empowerment should ideally look like within an organisation.
• What can happen in organisations where employees and managers do not feel empowered.
• The steps managers and employees can take to become more empowered when they are faced with negative politics and bureaucracy.
• How organisations can challenge the traditional model of a top-down organisational hierarchy and build autonomy and empowerment from the inside out.
• An overview of Peter's latest book, "The Abundant Community: Awakening The Power of Families and Neighborhoods."

Transcript

Female interviewer: Peter Block is an internationally renowned author and organisational development consultant. He is the author of many bestselling books, including the classic business titles "Flawless Consulting" and "The Empowered Manager."

In this engaging interview, Peter outlines his thought provoking approaches which employees and managers alike can use to become more empowered.

Peter begins by explaining what empowerment means to him.

Peter Block: You have to be careful about the word because sometimes people use the sentence, ‘I am going to empower my people.’ So that sentence fights with itself. You don’t empower your people, partly because these are not your people. If you are a manager... the book was written for managers… you don’t own these people. So the first step in empowerment is an act of consciousness which says that these are not my people, I don’t own them, they are not property, they aren’t mine to produce, they are not mine to develop, I have the power to tell them what to do and then they decide whether to do it or not. So the idea that people follow orders with compliance is a way to build a business is just an obsolete thought because it…for compliance to work, fear has to be operating, and fear is not a very good motivator, it is not a very good way to create, you know, good customers or good shareholders or stakeholders.

So empowerment is the willingness first to stop acting as if you are the father or the owner and second is to give people choice at lower and lower levels in whatever system you are operating. So empowerment exists when people in the middle or at the bottom have been given a choice over the way their work is done, the customer is served, the money is spent, the mop is purchased.

I gave a talk once at a university, the University of California, and they warned me now, they said, a lot of our… we have a lot of non- management people here and you have to be very careful to define terms with them because English is a second language and they warned me about this about six times. So I am talking to a few hundred people and five minutes into my presentation on empowerment, a guy raises his hand and stands up and he is obviously, you know, a worker, and he says, ‘I’m a janitor, I got what you are saying, why won’t they let me order my own broom and mop?’ And I thought, ‘He got it, presentation over. Bye.’

That was at 9 in the morning. 9.05. So at 2 in the afternoon the middle managers are still asking for a definition of empowerment. Which means that when you ask for something to be defined it means they don’t agree with it because these ideas aren’t that complicated.

So what it looks like is that guy being able to buy his own broom but within the scope of a circle of experience or job title, people can increasingly make a decision on how they work with the tools they work with and the way it works.

And you feel it. You walk into any organisation, you can tell in ten minutes whether the person you are talking to has a sense of control over what they are up to or not and most places are so mad about control that the idea of empowerment…it took a lot of nerve on our part, me and the publisher, to even choose that word because in the mid-1980s it wasn’t popular, and it was felt a little edgy.

Female interviewer: Peter, you have described for me there what empowerment should really look and feel like within an organisation and I wanted to ask you about the flip side of that question and what happens in organisations where people feel that they really are not empowered?

Peter Block: I am thinking of revising the book and your interest may push me along that direction, because I… basically the book is about if you open the door, people will walk through, if you give them the choice they will take it. And what I discovered is that the employees are as resistant to making choices being… taking real accountability as managers are to give it up. And I have seen many, many places where, you know, managers, and I bet many of your listeners are among the more progressive change oriented managers, where they say, ‘Okay, I gave them choice, I sat them down, I said “Why don’t you guys decide on purchasing, why don’t you decide in the grocery store, why don’t you design the ends?”’

I worked with a hardware store once where I loved their catalogue and the guy shows up at a workshop and so I started working with him and he used that hardware store as an empowerment zone where he said, ‘Okay, you are going to learn the front end, you are going to learn how to design a catalogue, you are going to learn how to merchandise’, it was quite amazing, and then he found that the employees said ‘That’s not what I came here for. I want safety, I don’t want adventure.’

And so where people do not feel that they are empowered partly it’s their own choice. And they say ‘I want safety, I don’t want to take’, be vulnerable because if you make choices, you make mistakes, and then everybody thinks failure is not an option. Managers feel that control is more important than performance and where employees want safety, ‘I want my mummy, I want my mentor, I want to be taken care of, tell me what you had in mind for me’ and so it is that combination. And what happens is they are operating in a highly patriarchal way. The boss knows, the boss feels these are my people and the people are happy to give up their sovereignty, that’s why they like performance reviews. And performance reviews are that moment of the year where I acknowledge that somebody else owns me and my future.

What happens is that people are operating in a high control way even if they are doing it lovingly and some companies are extremely paternalistically, they are very aware they have… they care for their employees, they have stores they can shop in, they have, you know, meetings and festivals and gatherings. So you can’t tell about empowerment by looking at how much love, care or compassion people have because often that is a mask for paternalism.

Female interviewer: Many people listening to this, Peter, will undoubtedly recognise aspects of this bureaucracy and negativity, either within themselves or indeed within their own organisation. How would you advise somebody who is a manager in an organisation and who really wants to become more authentic and entrepreneurial but they are surrounded by bureaucracy and negativity in their organisation?

Peter Block: The world around me is bureaucratic. The world around me is filled with negative politics. Negative politics are people mad about control and in love with spin so you never know what’s really going on.

The advice is let it be. Just watch it and find it interesting. You can’t confront negative politics, you can’t say to people ‘Stop being such a negative political person, stop being so bureaucratic.’ That conversation doesn’t take you anywhere. What you can do is say, ‘What do I have some choice over?’ Now the choice you make will always carry some risk with it but my deep belief is that if you choose to be more authentic or more entrepreneurial in your actions and it works, you are not going to get in trouble. If it doesn’t work you are going to get in trouble. But that’s the way the world is. So what. Get in trouble.

You know, most of us are peeking now anyhow just to see if we stand up or get shot is pure illusion. You are not going to get shot unless you get nasty. People get fired because they get aggressive or they have given up. They don’t get fired because they make mistakes. I’ve asked people, ‘Who got fired in your place for making a mistake, who got fired for standing up and were you in the room, do you know it or was it just hearsay?’ and mostly people don’t, they say, ‘Well, I just heard about it.’ Well it doesn’t happen that way. So that’s the, the thought is if whatever is around you has nothing to do with how you… how authentic and entrepreneurial you want to be.

So to be authentic is to name things as they are, that’s all. If something is not working, say it’s not working; if you made a mistake, you say ‘I made a mistake’, if somebody is bugging you, you say ‘You are doing things that are bothering me.’ You don’t call it feedback, you don’t tell them it would be helpful, you tell them, ‘This is bothering me’ and you let it go. Well that’s authenticity.

Being entrepreneurial is being choiceful. I can decide no matter what I do, I can decide I am going to act as an owner of this plan. So what do owners do? Well, they do what needs to be done, they don’t worry about boundaries, they make decisions in the best interests of a larger system, not just my own unit and they are willing to fail. There has never been an entrepreneur who hasn’t failed. And you know, you fail with good intent.

Female interviewer: Something that you did mention earlier on, Peter, was that people can sometimes use the bureaucracy that exists in their organisation as a kind of comfort blanket because it means they can be dependent on others as you have said, and that they don’t need to take risks. What would you say to people who feel this way?

Peter Block: The only piece of advice I have is if you feel you are in a bureaucratic culture, is to ask yourself the question, ‘What are you doing to contribute to the bureaucracy, to sit back and talk about those bureaucratic people?’ And you know, the first two questions if you are a consultant, there are two sentences you know are going to occur in the first ten minutes. The first sentence is, ‘How do we fix those people?’ And every client I ever had started the engagement with the question, ‘How will you help us to fix them?’ And that question is the essence of the bureaucratic world, to think that those people would be different, we would be different, I would be different. So the first thing is to stop believing that somehow other people are the problem or that you can, they are going to change. They are not going to change. They are going to get worse. So first is to say, ‘What am I doing to contribute to the bureaucracy?’

The second question, after they say ‘How are you going to fix these people?’, is really a statement. It says, ‘You don’t know what it’s like around here, Mr Empowerment.’ Pepsi called me once on a Friday afternoon and said, ‘Ah, you’re the brand name in empowerment’, this was after I wrote the book, and I thought, ‘No kidding, have I, yes I am’, you know, I was sitting there trying to stay awake. ‘You’re the brand name in empowerment and we want to talk to you.’ I said, ‘Yes I am, now how can I help you?’ And they said, ‘Well, we have added empowerment to our list of five values. We want to revise the performance appraisal pro forma to include empowerment. We want to do research on how empowered are we and set some goals for empowerment.’ And I thought, ‘Well, that really captures in some ways the loss of that word’, that everything they were doing was in the context of disempowerment, of patriarchy, of more control.

So what people can do is, don’t talk about the change of other people, don’t worry about your boss and what surrounds you and use language that has ownership in it. Here’s what we are doing that’s contributing to the problem, here are the choices we have and to never consider that the situation is fixed. I don’t care what you are up against. The advice is to say, ‘Well, if I am in a situation that seems hopeless, it is my calling it hopeless that’s the problem, it’s not the situation.’

Female interviewer: Peter, you have said that one of the key ways of challenging bureaucracy is to turn the traditional model of a top down organisational hierarchy on its head and to build autonomy from the inside out. Now, for some organisations this represents quite a major shift. Could you perhaps offer some advice for where organisations can start on this journey?

Peter Block: I can offer a way of thinking but I would say, are there ways of how to shift our thinking. You see, what needs to turn upside is how I think about the world because that’s where my action goes on it. And so you begin to think well suppose the opposite of what I thought was true was also true, suppose when you are in a team and you are complaining about your boss, suppose I begin to think that I am producing that boss and that we as a team if we ever got together could decide how we function here and the boss would have to follow.

I mean leadership is finding out what people have in mind and getting in front of them you know. So it’s thinking about where this control is, what is the cause here? And you know, some people have done it structurally, they draw their organisation in a circle which expresses their interdependence rather than desire for control. Some people have changed titles and in Mars there is really one of the most empowering companies I have ever worked with, they are quite amazing. One of their core values is freedom and I have never seen a company having the nerve to go public and laminate the word freedom before. So they call people associates. They talk about changing the culture through engagement instead of rolling things out and kind of, you know, controlling things.

And so basically, to turn an organisation or a hierarchy on its head, is to think the opposite of what you used to think about control, about choice, about which people are really producing this business. You turn it upside down by treating top management as if they are not that important. If the CEO of First National Food Store can’t get the ketchup thickened, then I am talking to the wrong guy. I need to talk to people that are making ketchup and so you begin to change your mind about who to invest training dollars and why don’t we invest more and more money in people in lower and lower levels? You change your mind about who’s the best trainers and line managers or the best educators, not professional facilitators so much, even though I make my living that way. You change your mind about where does control, if we want to review performance, shouldn’t peers be talking to each other, forget about this anal performance review, this is just silly. You know, it’s an artefact of patriarchy that won’t go away but the idea that my boss is my best coach. You start saying, ‘Well, you want a coach, well let’s look around, why don’t you decide who would be good for you, not your boss?’

So these are all product called inversions and you do build autonomy from the inside. Inside of me I am going to act like an owner and then I am going to gather people around me who are also willing to act like owners and if the boss doesn’t approve, if the boss doesn’t like it, well the boss probably doesn’t like me that much anyhow. What have you got to lose? The bullet’s on its way. You have just got to decide if you want to be bent over or standing up when it comes and that’s just, you know, a metaphor for saying, to be afraid is a choice and I think it is a lousy choice in a work setting because it makes you more cautious and when people do cut back they are not going to cut back the more entrepreneurial you know, they are going to look for people that they don’t see doing very much and that could be me if I am afraid of my own autonomy.

Female interviewer: Now Peter, today we have been talking about the empowered manager, but I understand that some of your more recent work has shifted from looking at organisations to really examining the social community in which we live. Could you tell me what has prompted this shift in your thinking and really what your new book "The Abundant Community" is about?

Peter Block: You know "The Abundant Community," there is also a book called "Community: The Structure of Belonging." When it came to organisations I felt like I had said everything I had to say and I just felt that I wanted to take these ideas about empowerment and stewardship and choice in a change in the conversation into a larger arena because I was kind of done with systems.

I just changed my attention from employee to citizen and "The Abundant Community" is really about the fact that we thought that we could outsource and purchase things that mattered the most to us. I thought that I could get the school to raise my children. I thought I could get the police to keep me safe. I thought that the doctors would keep me healthy. I thought the government had something to do with the amount of jobs going on in my area. I thought that if people were ill, mentally ill or disabled we should put them in systems and institutions. It turns out that none of those things are true really. The schools help, the police help, the government helps, the institution, but in the end these systems have their limits and if I want to raise a child, it’s the neighbourhood that has got to raise the child. My child needs to be surrounded by more than a nuclear family. The call in "The Abundant Community" book is for the return of citizens to take it upon themselves what systems are limited in providing. It’s not an argument against systems. It is just saying if I want to be safe or have a child that grows up as a powerful and engaged citizen, you and I and the people around that child have to get together.

Female interviewer: Thank you for listening to this audio interview.

You can find out more about Peter Block by visiting his websites peterblock.com and designedlearning.com.

You can also find out about his latest book "The Abundant Community" at abundantcommunity.com.