Empowerment

EMPOWERMENT – building a mandate for people across the organisation to shape and deliver change.

The Empowerment dimension in People-Centred Change involves you as a Senior Practitioner in providing others (specifically your in-house participants on the Practitioner Programme) with the mandate, confidence and focus to make change happen. It also emphasises your role in supporting others through the difficulties and challenges they may face during the change process.

The exact nature of your role will depend on what else is happening (or not happening) in your workplace – are people already empowered to make improvements in the way they work or will this be a new experience for most? Either way, Senior Practitioners must build a coaching relationship with others involved in the change journey. In combination with the tools described in the Empowerment section of the Practitioner Programme, Using Coaching Principles to Transform Workplace Relationships will help you to create spaces in which others can reflect and learn from their involvement in change, helping them to address both the challenges and opportunities that arise, not least by reinforcing confidence to challenge established practices.

Peer-to-peer interaction and support play a similar, and equally powerful role in strengthening empowerment. Stimulating workplace innovation and driving it forward through experimentation and shared learning can be an invigorating experience – but it comes with challenges and dilemmas, not least when you meet resistance or deep-rooted problems. This is where Action Learning can prove invaluable. Sharing experiences and problems with ‘comrades in adversity’, either from your own organisation or from others, can be a powerful source of inspiration, learning and support to complement the other resources available to you in the Programme.  You will be asked to facilitate Action Learning Sets within your organisation using the principles outlined in the Action Learning module, capturing your experiences in the Learning Log. Sometimes we will also create Action Learning sets involving Programme participants from different companies.

At its heart, workplace innovation is about the active participation of people at every level in improving their organisations. Each of the four Elements reveals opportunities for employees to reshape working practices in pursuit of a shared vision – whether by individuals re-crafting their own jobs or through the deployment of employee-driven innovation and employee voice to help renew organisational structures, management roles and processes. The ultimate aim of People-Centred Change is to introduce empowering workplace practices throughout the organisation that lead to a self-sustaining momentum of improvement and innovation.

Exercise 5: Empowerment – building and mandating your change coalition

Harnessing the enthusiasm and energy of people from across the organisation plays an essential part in making change happen. In the Practitioner Programme’s Creating a Change Coalition section we suggest identifying a smaller group of people enthusiastic about change to spread the impact of change. You have a key role to play in this as a Senior Practitioner, with the responsibility of ensuring that these ‘change coalition’ members are given the mandate, authority and time they need to ask difficult questions, challenge established practices and experiment with new ways of working.

This Exercise asks you to speak to each member of your change coalition, asking them to identify the specific areas of support that will enable them to be active in driving change forward. Factors to consider include (but may not be limited to):

  • clear senior team mandate and support;
  • line managers;
  • performance metrics;
  • time allocation;
  • pressure of work;
  • physical space;
  • confidence/skills
  • perceived obstacles to effective participation.

The following Learning Log question asks you to summarise your findings from these discussions and to identify the actions you’ve taken to address them.

Learning Log Question
[progressally_note note_id=’1′ allow_attachment=’yes’]
Exercise 6: Empowerment – building your own resilience and that of others

We also need to focus on your own wellbeing as a change leader. Take a fresh look at the Quick Guide to Resilience in the Building a Mandate section of the Practitioner Programme, and answer the following question in the Learning Log about your own experiences.

Learning Log Question
[progressally_note note_id=’2′ allow_attachment=’yes’]
[progressally_note note_id=’4′ allow_attachment=’yes’]
[progressally_note note_id=’5′ allow_attachment=’yes’]

Objectives
[progressally_objectives]

« Previous