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Michael F. Brower: PhD from Harvard, 15 years' academic experience and 20 years in business consulting. He heads his own consulting and training organization at 30 Alpine Street, Cambridge, MA 02138.
Everyone is talking about empowerment these days but few understand it. To go deeper, this article focusses on "empowering teams", with "empowering" used in two different ways. As an adjective, it refers to a kind of team. What is the nature of these teams that empower, what do they do, and what are their benefits? The first gives a few answers. Considering "empowering" as a verb gives us different questions: what does it take to empower teams, how do organizations, how do we, go about empowering teams? The rest of the article presents and describes a model, arguing that empowerment requires four essential As: authority, accountability, alignment of direction, and ableness. Empowering teams to succeed and survive over time also requires information, supportive functions and systems, and leadership at four levels.
What are empowering teams, and why?
Empowering teams are teams that plan, carry out, and improve their value-adding work. To do this they develop the ableness of their members so that they become learning teams and engines of development. Depending on how they are structured and how long they live, product design teams or special project teams can be empowering teams. So can supervisor-led natural work teams, if the supervisor has the will and skills (ableness) to be a team leader and coach. Permanent front-line self-managing or self-directed teams (SDTs) that do all of this without traditional direct supervision are a stage more empowered and empowering of their members. The model presented here is most relevant for SDTs, also called self-regulating teams, autonomous work groups, and semi-autonomous work groups.
What do these teams do? Just about everything. They cross-train their members, making it possible to balance the work load and quickly respond to shifting demand and making the members more valuable. Team members have authority to make decisions on the spot, providing instant responses to customer needs. They take on equipment selection, layout, installation, and maintenance and also material handling, work scheduling and inspection. This puts full accountability for creating and delivering high quality products and services right into the team. They...