Now for me I don't really like the word "empowerment" - I prefer the word "trust". I don't "empower" my teams I "trust" them to get on with the job they've trained for. It reminded me of a presentation I onced attended by the then CEO of Unilever. He had already listened to the HR Director explaining how they recruited, trained and then empowered people in Unilever. He explained that "That's what I dislike about HR. We don't recruit we attract. We don't train - we develop and we don't empower we trust our people to get on with the job that we pay them for". I'm not sure what happened to the HR Director afterwards but it seemed like a pretty strong dressing down to me in front of the Top Unilever Management.
Empowerment is covered really well in Zapp!: The Lightening of Empowerment by William C Byham. The book is written as a readable story in the same way as Goal! a process of on-going improvement and The Noah Project. This approach makes it easy to read and appreciate the ideas without a lot of "consultancy speak".
Today's link is part of my Agile People Skills presentation and covers Empowerment in an Agile environment. Tomorrow I'm thinking of uploading Agile & Communications (verbal & non-verbal) which most people say is the most useful part of the entire training session!
Leave me some comments if you'd like me to cover some other Agile topics as well
Mike
Let me know your comments...
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