CHAPTER 1

Taking Action and Driving Decisions

What’s the Problem?

It’s hard to get anything done without fuel. Just as your smartphone fails to deliver if its battery is dead, you can’t deliver if you don’t have the fuel—if you’re not empowered to take action and drive decisions. But we are frequently up against red tape that prevents us from taking action and driving decisions, and the feeling of being blocked or constrained can easily drain our energy and make us feel like giving up or blaming others.

On the other hand, we know there is too much at stake—not only for you, but for your manager and the organization at large—to simply be resigned to inaction. Too many people are depending on you, and yet you may feel disempowered. The only way to overcome this feeling is to change your perception and adopt an empowered mindset.

I define empowerment as “a reasonable degree of autonomy to take action and drive decisions.” Empowerment that is not effective can severely limit an individual’s impact, while empowering someone who has questionable competence or judgment could prove disastrous.

When we feel disempowered, our first instinct is to blame our supervisor or manager, to whom we report. I like to use the broader term team leader, whether it’s your actual manager or a more indirect, somewhat temporary leader you work with.

Have you ever complained about your “boss”? Some people make it an art form. I can recall a colleague years ago who had a dartboard with a picture of the CEO in the middle of it. Fortunately, they were only darts on a dartboard. But could we be part of the problem?

Most people periodically do have serious issues with the person to whom they report. You can come in genuinely excited about a new idea, only to hear that now is not the time. Or you might feel an undercurrent of negative judgment, leading you to question where you stand with this individual who can help or harm you and your aspirations. It can take years to heal after working for a manager who lost confidence in one’s ability to succeed. Some never recover. This can be truly frustrating. It can derail one’s career.

For Seinfeld fans, perhaps you saw the episode in which George misses a key word his manager (yes, he worked briefly) mentions when asking him to take on a new project. Of course George can’t simply ask his manager to repeat that one word he missed. So he goes through the entire episode perplexed as to what he’s supposed to accomplish, but acting as though he did understand. Have you ever experienced that?

You may also feel that you’re “supposed to know.” By having to ask, you might telegraph that you’re too junior for that position, or not smart enough, that more-senior people would surely know. Having worked behind the scenes with countless executives, I can assure you that many if not most of them periodically would love to ask their boss, “So tell me exactly, what do you want?”

But is it all on your team leader if this key relationship is less than stellar? Do you as a team member have a responsibility in this? George in that Seinfeld episode certainly did. He chose not to take the risk of simply asking his manager to repeat that missing word. Can you imagine trying to manage someone like George? Just considering that for a moment brought a smile to my face.

The key is that an empowered mindset is more like an empowered relationship. It’s a two-way street, encompassing a dynamic relationship between a specific team leader and team member that is unique to each pair and changes over time. This relationship produces a level of trust between the two people that, for good or for bad, determines the degree of empowerment the team member will experience.

There is no policy, company dictate, or truism that can drive the trust in this relationship. It has to be built and earned by the two players involved. Spoiler alert: in this book you will learn the key skills that will lay out for you how to make this relationship dramatically more successful and less frustrating.

WHAT IF YOU’RE A MANAGER?

For those of you who have been promoted to management, you inevitably still report to someone one step above you. So you have two problems. First, you have to deal with the ever-present issues with your team leader. But second, you have to deal with the people reporting to you as well. Let’s refer to them as team members (you may know them as “direct reports”). And with each team member, you have a unique empowered relationship.

It’s hard to determine to what extent you ought to let go in any situation. If you don’t let go enough, you may become the bottleneck, slowing progress to a halt. Let go too much and you never know what’s going to happen—you’ve lost control and influence. Finding that sweet spot for that specific team member, situation, and moment in time is daunting. This occurs throughout an entire organization, every day, at every level.

WHAT ABOUT AT HOME?

Do we have similar challenges at home? To think of our relationships at home as ones that need to be “managed” would degrade the very essence of a home. However, the same problems and dynamics that arise in our organizations inevitably crop up at home, because we are all human. Learning to approach them with an empowered mindset will leave everyone feeling more free and energized. One partner may have significantly more experience, interest, or capability than the other relative to a specific situation or responsibility, whether that’s planning a vacation, doing a remodel, paying the bills on time, working out issues with the kids’ teachers, or just getting through life’s ups and downs.

What if one partner always planned the vacations but simply is tired of that responsibility? Now hoping their partner will pick up this role with the same rigor and competence, how does one let go while the other steps up to take it on—without screwing up their future vacations? I’ve seen people just give up and forgo the vacation rather than figure this out. And does this apply to dealing with adolescents as they move through their teens, as well as dealing with the transitions of your aging parents? If someone doesn’t feel empowered to take action, crucial turning points in our lives and in the lives of our loved ones can end up terribly mismanaged.

Back at work, to better understand what we mean by a team member “taking action and driving decisions,” consider the opposite. What if someone routinely is not able to take action, even when it seems appropriate given his or her role and experience? Or what if a team member can’t drive decisions that are relevant and within a reasonable scope of that role? For example, imagine a marketing organization in which your role is to help launch new products. Let’s say you have ten years of experience working at multiple companies, but virtually every decision you could conceivably make has to go back up to your manager for approval. Clearly some decisions should require higher-level approval, but virtually all of them?

Think about how much that would slow down the work, not just for you in your role, but for all the people involved. Think how frustrated and potentially demeaned people would feel, and consider the implications when great talent feels undervalued and micromanaged. It is not uncommon for team members in these situations to seek new employment elsewhere.

But let’s ask a question. Whose job is really at risk if a team member repeatedly fails to deliver or makes a big mistake? I’ve heard many people ask, “Why won’t my manager simply let me try it? If it doesn’t work out, they can always fire me!” But whose job is at risk? It’s not just the direct report who may be out looking for a new job if something goes wrong. This manager is also culpable in the eyes of his or her leadership.

That is why many managers are reluctant to empower team members or direct reports too much—their own jobs and reputations are at risk if the outcome is less than expected. These leaders may also often think they can do it better and faster than others on their team, perhaps out of their own passion to produce a successful outcome.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are situations in which team leaders can let go too much or appear to be almost reckless in empowering their team members. Many times, these leaders are so busy with their own work that they lose sight of the role they play in leading their team members.

For example, have you ever been told, “You’re empowered—make it happen”? You could interpret it as a firm commitment of your manager’s support—clarification that you are now in charge of driving the outcome, have unlimited authority, and may even be able to stretch the rules given the importance of the outcome. But what if your team leader says this when the schedule is particularly tight, the scope is too vague, and the other executives are not fully on board? Then you may actually feel a bit set up—not for success, but for failure. These situations are clearly suboptimal and could result in talent leaving or poor business results.

EMPOWERED MINDSET PROBLEMS

It may be helpful to consider the issues in our work environments first. Here are two key problems that we find in developing an effective empowered mindset:

  1. People tend to equate empowerment (the ability to take action and drive decisions) with absolute authority (“I own it and I can do it on my own or make people do it”). This is an impossible assumption. Without reasonable expectations and boundaries, most people will feel frustrated that they can’t do what they need to do and will instead feel like they are being led improperly. This may still be the case, of course, but they are unlikely to ever have 100 percent authority in a complex organization.

Why? The reason absolute authority is not feasible is because most work in today’s complex organizations is interconnected. Roles and projects of various leaders overlap. There are often cross-functional, multidisciplinary, cross-agency, cross-geographical, and other cross-team implications. This means that individual members on teams often report up to managers who report up to different executives. So even if a team leader wanted to empower a team member (direct report or someone else on their team) with absolute authority, it probably wouldn’t be possible, because that higher-level executive more than likely doesn’t have absolute authority either.

  1. The second problem with empowerment is that there is no such thing as one-size-fits-all. Every team leader has a unique relationship with each of his or her team members that influences the relative level of empowerment. Even further, assuming most team members have several areas of responsibility, their degree of empowerment will likely vary among those responsibilities.

There are many factors that affect the degree to which a leader empowers his or her team members:

The amount of trust that is ultimately built over time between the team leader and team member will affect an individual’s level of empowerment to take action and drive decisions. In the coming chapter, we will fully explore what both the team leader and the team member can do to build trust over time.

Through working with so many different companies throughout the world, I’ve found that many of them try to build empowerment by focusing exclusively on the manager. In my view, that simply doesn’t work. We need to focus on the relationship—what both parties can do simultaneously to build the trust necessary for rapid progress.

The Ready and Waiting: Empowered Relationships Is Weak

If a person is strong on both alignment and collaboration but weak on empowered relationships, it creates the Ready and Waiting. These people are aligned to the greater goals and know the right thing to do. They work very well with others, but they can’t act because they simply aren’t empowered to do so.

This can cause a great deal of frustration for the people who have to depend on the Ready and Waiting in meetings to represent their functions or areas of expertise.

An un-empowered team member’s frustration alone can often lead him or her to reconsider those job offers that keep coming in from other companies.

Example of the Ready and Waiting

Here’s an example of the Ready and Waiting: someone who had a strong track record of high performance prior to joining the company. There are many versions of Jane in most organizations.

Jane was a relatively new employee at her company. Her manager knew he could no longer do everything he was doing, so he had hired Jane to take over some of his responsibilities and figure out ways to scale and strengthen the existing processes.

Jane had worked in many successful companies that had seen hypergrowth. She had deep functional expertise and knew the pains of trying to scale a business. In addition, everyone who had interviewed her thought she was great—and it was confirmed once they started working together. Jane sought out partnerships and insights from other teams across the organization. She clearly had a collaborative style. In addition, she considered a broader view of the organization’s challenges and strategies when she proposed new ideas. She was aligned with what the business really needed.

However, Jane struggled with the amount of freedom to act and make decisions. While her manager had said he wanted to let go, much of what Jane was doing were things that had made him successful and had given him visibility in the past. He was wary of new ideas and delayed implementation in order to get more information, confirm budget, or just think about it. In the end, Jane was not empowered to make the kind of difference she thought she could. In addition, it adversely affected everyone else around her. She felt frustrated and micromanaged. Jane was Ready and Waiting.

The empowered, alignment, and collaboration mindsets are indeed required to make our work count. If any one of these is weak, it will disproportionately diminish overall impact.

What’s the consequence at home, if you don’t have this fuel to take action and drive decisions? Much comes to a standstill. Projects go uncompleted, savings don’t materialize, outings get stymied. But it doesn’t stop there. People then take out their frustrations in other, less-than-constructive patterns. This is often referred to as passive-aggressive—not really calling out the problem, but continually and subtly sabotaging each other. We can do better.

The good news is that these solutions will enable you to make a much greater difference at work and reduce the frustrations that you probably bring home. And you can use these same skills at home to make that part of your life more fulfilling and less frustrating. More impact, less frustration? Interested in learning how—based on thousands of people at the world’s best innovation organizations?

Now let’s consider the solution for strengthening the empowered mindset—by first exploring what the team leader needs to do to be more empowering, and then in the following chapter, what the team member needs to do to be more empowerable—to ensure you have the fuel needed to take action and drive decisions.