Spirit of Organization

A little boy watched as a newly transformed butterfly struggled to wriggle its way out of its cocoon. Feeling sorry for the creature and its terrible struggle, the boy decided to help him by cutting the edges of the cocoon and thus allowing the butterfly to exit more easily. To the boy’s horror, what came out was not a beautiful butterfly, but a wrinkled and ugly caricature of a butterfly that died soon after exiting the cocoon. The boy failed to understand that the struggle of pushing its way through the tiny hole in the cocoon was God’s way of forcing the creature’s blood out into its newly formed wings, forcing them to expand and enabling the caterpillar to become a fully developed butterfly.

Empowerment works the same way. As people are given the freedom to act on their own, they are also held accountable for the outcomes of their efforts. This can be a painful experience, but it is this process of struggle that generates true learning.

Learning has much to do with how we handle the inevitable failures that occur when one is responsible for his or her actions. The fear of failure is why so many people shy away from taking responsibility and why we often want the freedom of empowerment without the corresponding responsibility. People who are unwilling to accept the responsibility for their decisions will also be unable to learn from their failures. Instead of learning, they will resort to the blame game, pointing to other people, to management, or to the environment as the cause of their failure. On the other hand, the truly empowered individual will see failure as a path to learning and improvement. This ability to handle failure creatively enables them to accept the responsibility of empowerment.

Empowerment is not a fluffy feel-good approach to management. It’s about allowing our own decisions and efforts to be filtered through the grid of results. It’s about honestly and objectively asking ourselves whether those results really contribute to the objective and about being willing to change our tactics when they don’t. I know of many churches that are dying on the vine because their leaders live in a constant state of denial. They blame their members for lack of spirituality or commitment. They blame society for its erosion of morality. They blame the mega-churches for watering down their doctrine. Yet, all the time, what is really happening is that the environment has changed and their strategies based on a by-gone era are failing to produce results. They don’t take responsibility for the failure and they don’t allow that failure to inform their learning. In other words, they have not allowed themsevles to become truly empowered.

Many people are intrigued by the thought of empowerment, but they have not counted the cost of empowerment. Empowerment is not only defined by freedom; it is also defined by responsibility. As Jamali, Khoury, and Sahyoun (2006) point out: “Empowerment extends beyond delegation to encompass true ownership and hence the true burden of responsibility” (p. 339). When people feel that they own not only the process, but also the outcomes, their lives can take on a sense of significance and meaning. All of us want to make a genuine contribution to objectives that we value. Nobody enjoys simply being the instruments of someone else’s plans and someone else’s goals. Managers who rely solely on the command and control paradigm of management will always fail to make use of the full potential of their people, because they fail to tap into this human need to make a significant contribution. At this very moment, our nation is in the midst of making radical decisions about the future of the country. Two models are being presented to the people: one that promises universal care and protection while removing many key liberties and another that offers liberty with responsibility, one that offers entitlement and another that offers empowerment.

Empowered teams are called to accomplish an objective. They are expected to produce results. They are free to develop the means and processes by which they will accomplish these objectives, but the only way to assess whether these efforts have been successful is to measure them against a clearly-defined set of criteria. Empowered individuals accept this challenge and are willing to subject their efforts to the test of objective measurement. They are willing to speak with facts and to allow these facts to judge their actions. In other words, they are willing to accept the responsibility of empowerment. If you and your team have been empowered to do something, the following questions may help you to accept that challenge with an attitude of responsibility.

1. What have you been empowered to accomplish? What is your mandate? Make sure you are clear about the final outcome you have been empowered to achieve. What are the expectations of your superiors? Ask yourself, what will things look like once success has been achieved? What kind of need will you fill? Who will benefit from the successful accomplishment of this task? What are their criteria for successful accomplishment? “Empowerment requires accountability to the mandate, and the higher vision and values of the [organization]. Empowerment does not mean team members can do as they please, get their own way, or operate with autonomy” (USACE, 2006).
2. What resources will you need to accomplish this task? According to Von Krogh, Ichijo, and Nonaka (2000), there are two basic kinds of resources: human capital and structural capital. “Human capital includes all individual capabilities–that is, the talents, knowledge, and experience of the company’s employees and managers. Structural capital consists of everything that remains when the employees go home–that is, the infrastructure that supports the company’s human capital, including the information technology and physical systems used to transmit intellectual capital” (p. 93). Who are the people who must buy into this project for it to be a success? What are the technologies you will need to accomplish the task? What financial resources will you need?
3. What are some trends taking place that should inform your strategy? This has to do with identifying and monitoring change through environmental scanning. It involves the practice of looking outside the organization. Lay aside for a moment your pre-conceptions about the project. Look at the realities of the current economic situation. Look at the trends in perceptions outside of the organization. The designers of airplanes can apply a tremendous amount the creativity and autonomy to the task of building the jetliners, but if they fail to adhere to the laws of physics then tragedy will result. Autonomy involves the application of your creative genius; responsibility involves learning to live within the constraints of the real world.

The bottom line is that people who want to be empowered need to count the cost of empowerment and realize that it also involves a higher degree of responsibility. It means being accountable for outcomes. It means being willing to submit one’s efforts to the test of objective measurement. It involves the subjection of our preconceptions to the realities of the external environment. Where there is no risk; there is no significance. Where there is no failure; there is no learning. Empowered people accept the risk and learn from the failures.

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Questions for Reflection

(1) What are some reasons why people often resist being accountable for their actions? (2) What are some failures you have experienced that have lead to deep learning? (3) What is the relationship between significance and risk? (4) What patterns of responsibility or irresponsibility do you see at work in your organization?

Works Cited

Jamali, D., G. Khoury, and H. Sahyoun. “From Bureaucratic Organizations to Learning Organizations.” The Learning Organization 13, no. 4 (2006): 337-352. Available at Emerald Journals (17 November 2006).

USACE. “Learning Organization: Empowerment.” US Army Corps of Engineers, 2006. Available at http://www.hq.usace.army.mil/cepa/learning/17.htm (17 November2006).

Von Krogh, Georg, Ichijo, Kasuo, and Nonaka, Ikujiro, Enabling Knowledge Creation: How to Unlock the Mystery of Tacit Knowledge & Release the Power of Innovation. Oxford University Press, 2000.

When things go wrong, when outcomes are not what were expected, or even when the entire project appears to have been a failure, they do not lose heart. If, instead of obtaining a 20% growth in sales, the numbers prove that sales actually dropped, they are not devastated. If after spending countless hours developing and promoting a new program intended to draw youth into the church, the ministry team finds that only a handful show up, they do not abandon their goal. Before becoming the sixteenth president of the United States and the man who led the union to victory in the civil war and to the abolishment of slavery, Abraham Lincoln experienced many failures. He failed as a business man, as a shopkeeper, and as a farmer. He failed at his first attempt for a political office, when he sought the office of speaker, and in his first attempt to go to Congress. He failed when he sought appointment to the U.S. Land Office. His running for the U.S. Senate failed. He failed when his friends tried to get him nominated for Vice President. None of these failures devastated his spirit of confidence. This is because empowered individuals possess an inner sense of spiritual resilience that serves as their source of confidence (Chandler, 2005, pp. 156-157).

Charles Handy (1990) refers to such individuals as being skilled at “negative capability,” which he defines as “the capacity to live with mistakes and failures without being downhearted or dismayed” (p. 68). It is the ability to personally assimilate and redirect negative circumstances and outcomes. It is the ability to turn a failure into a learning experience that leads one closer to success. When any team moves from the ideals of a well-prepared plan into the realm of reality, negative experiences are inevitable. No plan, no matter how well-prepared, can avoid the capriciousness of real life. The empowered team member is able to face up to these negative experiences with a sense of personal confidence that carries him or her through the experience and closer to a truly effective solution.

In a recent effort to make better contact with potential students for Mid-South Christian College, we devised a plan that we called Extreme Makeover. The idea was to invite High School aged students onto campus and ask them to give us their honest feedback about our facilities and programs. Many hours went into the preparations for promoting the event and for the event itself. Thirty people said they would be there but only three showed up. Experiences like these can lead to wrong conclusions such as: “They’re just not interested.” Or “That idea was not a good one.” We discovered, however, that, though the idea was great, our timing was wrong. We tried to do it during the summer months when churches already have a full program planned way in advance. In addition, we had not given the youth directors sufficient time to work our plan into their plans. Instead of being a failure, this project provided us with vital information about how to proceed in our next attempt. Thankfully, the level of confidence in our team enabled us to learn from this failure and developed an improved plan for the future.

The opposite of confidence is self-doubt and people who live in a constant state of self-doubt are not likely to accept the challenge of empowerment. For them, the additional responsibility required by empowerment only means more opportunity for failure which they avoid at all costs because failure threatens their fragile sense of self-worth (Handy, 1990, p. 74). For such individuals, the authorization to make one’s own decisions about how to spend money only increases the possibility of spending it unwisely. The freedom to develop one’s own plans and processes only increases the potential for developing a poorly conceived plan. The technical term for this dynamic is “attribution.” They automatically attribute failure to something within themselves and consequently avoid responsibilities that would increase the potential for failure. In other words, they play it safe to protect their sense of self-worth making empowerment a very threatening proposition.

This is where empowerment moves beyond just management principles and organizational structures and becomes very personal. It has to do more with one’s spiritual resources than it does with the organizational chart. Assuming that both the leadership and also the structure encourage empowerment, there is yet a question that must be answered: Does the team member have a personal source of resilience that will enable him to bounce back from setbacks? Or is she constantly attempting to plug into the power source of other people? If the latter, then these individuals are not likely to work well in an empowering environment because they feel they cannot trust themselves with that kind of autonomy.

The only way empowerment can be a reality is for individual employees to develop and maintain an emotional and spiritual health that enables them to accept the higher levels of responsibility inherent in an empowering context. The Bible tells of an encounter between Jesus and a woman who evidently lived on the power sources of other people in her life. Her drive to “plug herself into” the power of others eventually led her through a series of five marriages and divorces and to a current relationship that was so lacking in commitment that they didn’t even bother with the formalities. That was where she was when she met Jesus and he pointed her to a source of inner resilience that would change her life and would be like “an artesian spring within, gushing fountains of endless life” (John 4:14, The Message). When people connect up with the source of life, then they are no longer oppressed by the addiction to approval from others. Failures can become learning experiences and life and work become instead of a threat to one’s sense of worth, but an adventure filled with opportunities. That’s the kind of people needed to form a team that is not only empowered but also effective.

Questions For Reflection

(1) What are some things a person can do to increase their spirit of resilience? (2) What should a leader look for as indications that an individual has the quality of resilience? (3) What is the difference between self-confidence and confidence in God and how are they related? (4) What are some things you do to encourage yourself in the face of setbacks?

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Works Cited

Chandler, Diane J. An Exploratory Study of the Effects of Spiritual Renewal, Rest-Taking, & Personal Support System Practices on Pastoral Burnout. Ph.D. Dissertation, Regent University, 2005.

Handy, Charles, The Age of Unreason. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1990.