Making Empowerment Work
Posted on 07. Jul, 2010 by SNS Research in Application
Some BPM consultants propose that processes are the most important corporate asset. I disagree because a process is an abstract entity that produces no value. Value is defined by human interaction in the real world. While abstract processes promise to make that human interaction more controllable they ignore human nature and workplace psychology, much as socialism andmunism do. These are idealistic concepts that fail in the real world of individual human agents. People are at their best when they feel that their contribution is valued as an individual. Therefore the idea of empowerment – making people responsible for their work – has been around for some time.
Why you would want to empower employees?
Empowerment is often misunderstood as authority for decisionmaking for everyone. Some tries at empowerment have failed to show the hoped for results because they followed the idea that all people are the same. The most important element of empowerment is the realization that people are different. Not clever and dumb, or lazy and hardworking, but just people in the wrong place.
I go with the 80/20 Pareto rule. 20% of people are responsible for 80% of results. But one can not fire the other 80% of people as the remaining would again structure the same. It means that only 20% of people have the interest and capability to take responsibility. I see them as process owners (PO) who can be given goals to chase. 20% is actually enough as the ideal team size is ten which provides one teamleader and one assistant/stand-in per team. The other eight rather want to be part of and even feel better when they are empowered as a team. If a person is unhappy as team member he may be a PO candidate, in the wrong team or have some other issues with job/private life relationships. If a team fails on goals the PO may be the problem.
So who manages the POs? At best two percent of people are natural motivators, people leaders, creative gurus and entrepreneurs. Ten process owners with a hundred people report to the 2% motivators/entrepreneur (ME) types. Voilá, there is your LEAN organization with the executive in the third line that ten MEs report to. It indicates that businesses get much harder to manage over a 1000 people and that I find confirmed by my own experience as well as Schuhmacher’s ‘Small is beautiful’. Size is not everything.
Empowerment requires two important elements: first, people coaching and second, business and process transparency. Calling for a coach is not an admittance of failure and sending in a coach is not punishment but a support action. The 2% MEs can be coaches or use additional coaches who should ideally have grown from the business itself.
Transparency is best achieved by a collaborative process support infrastructure – certainly not your run-of-the-mill BPM/SOA software. Transparency enables monitoring of (business) goal achievement of each team to verify if goals are set sensibly and well understood. There are no flows for the process of a PO, but Role Activity Diagrams are practical to show PO relationships. POs are empowered to question goals and can decide to change the way their goals are achieved. All structureal changes are agreed upon by the pre and post linked POs with the ME in attendance.
What is needed to empower people in a process-owning business?
The definition of the processes of empowerment:
The executive defines a business strategy and architecture by assigning processes.
The PO uses that to define how to execute:
IT and business necessities:
Conclusion:
So why would empowerment work better than stick and carrot, known as reward and punishment, or strict quality monitoring? Each action in an empowered organization drives productivity forward, while rigidly planned organizations (hierarchically or not) waste bureaucratic energy on analysis and designs, policing procedures and reward/punishment systems. Not only that but each controlling or monitoring action, and each reward will cause counterproductive forces in the organization. When I was a salesman in IBM, the salesmission system caused a lot of distortion of what was sold to the customer and sales always used it to their advantage.
Today most IT solutions either use pre- and hardcoded processes that are then enforced. Employees have to execute standardized processes (to reduce cost) for an abstract, statistically classified customer. IT is seen mostly as a people and cost reduction tool by automating and industrializing.
The missed opportunity is however that it could also be used for a new kind of architectured collaboration (Web2. 0 for business entities) that truly enables empowerment. IT would suddenly not be an expense but turn the business into a new kind of organization with unheard of dynamics.
Read more SNS Articles at sns.ac.cn
Too many BPM consultant use the term “Process” when they mean “Workflow”. Processes, which are “Coordinated activities to produce an outcome”, produce value when that outcomes is a service with value to a customer. This shouldn’t be confused with a strict ordering of activities according to a preconceved plan – a workflow. This is only one form of a process.
Another form is to give the employees the power and the tools to personalise the delivery of the service to maximise the value for the customer.
Minimising cost vs. maximising customer value are two strategies. Which is appropriate depends on many things including market conditions and available resources. Neither is right or wrong per se – only in context. An both can be examples where processes deliver value.