Empowerment – The Preventative for Organizational Entropy

My friend the Kerrmudgeon asked me to take a stab at organizational entropy, specifically when leaders set up systems and these systems run smoothly, but only for so long as the leader is around.  Once the leader is absent for an extended period of time the state of things descends into Chaos.

In the conclusion of Grounded Service I quoted Peter Drucker and I will do so again, and then reformulate it a little:

"Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion, and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership." - Peter Drucker

Nik’s Reformulation:  “In the absence of leadership, entropy reigns.”

I’ve seen entropy defined a number of ways over the years.  The dictionary on my shelf has a few definitions, two of which are:

“1a in a thermodynamic system, a measure of the energy that is not available for conversion into mechanical work”

“2b the tendency of the universe towards increasing disorder”

I did dust off my thermodynamics textbook to see if there was a definition there that was useful (to this discussion)…nope.

The corollary to Drucker’s quote above is that good leadership reduces organizational entropy by helping to get people aligned to a coherent vision and everyone on the boat is paddling in the same direction. 

Reduced entropy = making more energy available for useful work.

Empowerment is key to making this energy more available to useful work in a sustainable way including when the “leader” is absent.  There are a lot of articles that talk about empowerment as though it is some kind of pixie dust coming out of a magic wand:

“you’re empowered” tap, “and you’re empowered” tap, “and you’re empowered” tap

and voila, now people are empowered and they will go forth and be leaders and work independently and magic(ie: profit) happens.  That my friends is a fairy tale and it makes me want to pull what little hair remains on my head.

Empowerment starts with getting the right people on the bus in the right seats, and then spending serious effort developing them.  When I see organizations complaining about a lack of talent (to empower) it makes me nuts.  A number of years ago I attended an Ontario Society for Professional Engineers event that explored the supposed engineering talent shortage in Ontario.  It was startling to me that 70% of graduates from engineering programs in Ontario after 10 years have left the profession.  A big part of young people abandoning engineering has to do with an unwillingness on the part of organizations to invest in people’s development.  A lot of organizations want to hire the perfect candidate that has perfectly relevant experience and will hit the ground running, minimal training or development required.  This approach to people is the opposite of empowerment; it is strictly extractive.  When the leaders in such organizations step away these people who are at a stagnant level of development will not step up and fill the leadership vacuum.  What has the organization or leadership done to earn this level of commitment from them?  Nothing.  The relationship is strictly mercenary.

Key elements to developing people are:

• Career planning

• Development plans with regular follow up

  • In addition to the obvious courses etc. this includes: actions by leadership such as looking for project or other assignment opportunities, and help in obstacle navigation

• Process ownership

Graduated process ownership, where people are able to take on increasing levels of process ownership, possibly without a formal promotion can really help to accelerate development and identify people with a lot of talent.  With widely distributed and graduated process ownership in an organization leadership depth is developed and “the” leader can step aside from time to time without entropy taking over.

This is not easy.  It takes first and foremost a commitment to people and their development.  THE precursor to empowerment is competency.  This feels obvious to me but I think it bears stating explicitly in this discussion:  empowering people past their level of competency is dangerous: the further past their level of competency the more danger!  Dangerous to them (they will tend to burn out rapidly), dangerous to the organization (should be obvious), and in the engineering world this would be dangerous to the broader public.

I think it is these two aspects in discussions of empowerment that are so very much missing:

1.      The need to empower people to their level of competency

2.      Competency is a precursor to empowerment

Empowerment done well is the preventative medicine that inoculates an organization against degenerative entropy by ensuring there is never a lack of leadership.

In the next newsletter I’ll take a look at failure to empower and those consequences.

As always, lively discussion and feedback is welcome.

Nik