Employee empowerment is all about energetic people with a positive attitude.
It can be quite helpful for motivation to understand how these two aspects contribute to empowerment.
People Choose Their Attitude And Energy
In the video about practical wisdom below, Barry Schwartz describes beautifully why we need more accountable, empowered employees. Let’s watch it first before we carry on:
Attitude and energy are both choices. Nobody can change these in any human being. People choose to have a negative or positive attitude. They also choose their level of energy and where to focus it.
Therefore, if attitude and energy are both choices then employee empowerment is a choice as well.
The Attitude/Energy Graph.
You will see that the vertical line represent energy, with high energy at the top and low energy at the bottom
The horizontal line represent attitude, with positive attitude on the left and negative attitude on the right.
Let’s have a look at the different employees in the attitude/energy graph.
The Compliant Employees
They have a positive attitude and low energy. These people will do anything you ask them to do, but not much more.
They are never late, but won’t put in the extra hours.
Their characteristics are as follow:
Happy, satisfied employees.
Won’t give leaders or others any problems.
They do whatever is asked of them without questioning things or creating any waves.
Changes come and go and they roll with the flow.
Responsible, but not necessary accountable for the results of the organization or the team.
Some employees can be compliant for 30 years.
They do their job as it is written in their job description.
The RIP (Retired in place) Employees
Also called the Quit and Stay employees...negative attitude and low energy.
You struggle to get rid of these people. They have quit working a long time ago but stay with the company.
These people never open their mouths in meetings (It takes too much energy). However, they will moan and groan after the meeting to fellow employees.
Some characteristics include:
They resist things very passively and covertly.
Moan, whine and complain.
Some Quit and Stay around for years.
They may let some of their responsibilities fall through the cracks, but not enough to get caught or fired.
The Cynical Employees
High energy, very present, but negative attitude.
Although they have high energy, it is focused on all the wrong things…the company politics…the self-protection and self-promotion.
Their characteristics include:
Not a bad group of people, because they have high energy.
Very vocal about their likes and dislikes.
Willingness to be committed and focused on the organization. Unfortunately they have somehow self selected themselves out of the “Positive Attitude” box. This is usually because of circumstances or issues that have evolved for them in the organization.
Most really good employees leave from here, because they believe they can’t make a difference any longer.
The challenge is how to make cynical people move over to the positive attitude and empowered box.
The Empowered Employees.
Positive attitude and high energy…also called the entrepreneurial type.
This box has nothing to do with the position in the company. There is this story about the two cleaners who worked for NASA. When they were interviewed on what they do at NASA, the one said that he is a cleaner. The other one said that he is helping astronauts getting into space.
You can guess which one was contributing to employee empowerment.
The characteristics of this group are:
Feel accountable for the results of the unit, division and organization.
They will do whatever it takes to get the job done and the customer satisfied.
Want to do what is right for the customers and the organization.
They have chosen to be empowered…to make a difference.
They are the employees that you want to hire and keep.
They recognize that employee empowerment is a choice they have made...no one made them empowered.
Make It Easy For People To Choose Employee Empowerment
We have seen in the video above and in the energy/attitude grid that employee empowerment is the choice of the employees. It cannot be given by management. So what can you do to improve employee empowerment?
Make it easy for them to choose a positive attitude and high energy. Here is what you can do:
Assess where you think your employees are on the grid.
Engage with individuals to get their view of where they think they are on the grid.
Discuss with them your views.
Ask them to come up with what you can do to make them choose to be empowered.
Implement their requests.
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