Empowerment - From Inside Out

“While growing up in Southern India, whenever I visited a temple, the sight of a huge elephant tied up with a small rope always amazed me! On the other side, seeing elephants pulling tons of wooden logs, causing mayhem in tens of acres of sugarcane fields, kept me perplexed how they can be restrained with a tiny rope at the temple. Later I realized the elephant is the potential in oneself and the tiny rope is the imaginary constraints that one constantly experiences which makes them ‘powerless’. Ever since, I evidenced this fact, started working with teams around me to bring clarity around strengths, opportunities, objectives and purpose in general. Enjoyed winning through others!”

This is a very personal but powerful story shared to me by a former colleague, Dr Srini Karra through my website. How often in our life that we have been hampered by those imaginary constraints and fears? It’s only when we admit our fears and recognize how those imaginary constraints are holding us back that we can begin moving forward.

Empowerment has become a buzzword in the business world and widely used in many contexts. Working environment that empowers employees has been shown to not only improve employee job satisfaction and loyalty, but also improve decision making by inspiring employees to engage in more critical and creative thinking. However, it is often very difficult to have a truly empowered working environment, partly because there is a misconception that empowerment simply means “giving people the power to make decisions”, rather than the concept of trusting that people already have the knowledge and abilities to make those decisions themselves.

From the perspective of aspiring leaders who are seeking for empowerment, it is very critical to understand and internalize that empowerment requires you to take ownership of issues, rather than “waiting to be empowered”. You need to be proactive in participation in the decision makings that concerning your own well being, your own rights, either in the business environment or broad society context. The question you should ask yourself is not who is going to let you, but rather who is going to stop you.

In a video posted by CEO of Panera Bread, Mr Niren Chaudhary, described the culture he tried to created at Panera Bread: ‘own it“. He went to explain that when you own it, you always talk in the language of solution. Many people can bring problems. When you own it, you would bring solutions along with the problem. Personally, Mr. Chaudhary emphasized that he was ok when people brought problems for the purpose of informing, discussing, brainstorming. But it is not advised to bring only problems if the focus is to simply complain. It is not only bad for business, it is bad for the emotion and culture. You become what you feed your mind with. Problem is about negativity while solution brings positivity.

Here is a linkedin comment by Sebastian Thalanany on one of my leadership blog posts about the Panera Bread culture promoted by its CEO, Mr Niren Chaudhary. In the context of empowerment, “owning one’s endeavor, is a step towards self-actualization, aligned with self-awareness that yields curiosity, continuous learning, and understanding, along an evolving journey of the servant, where leadership is implicit.”

Most western businesses today operate as global business units. Headquarters often make strategic decisions and local or regional teams in different parts of the world simply implement the strategy or plan. There is always a tug between the two different centers of gravity. On the one hand, HQ team often feels that they tend to have the strategic view of overall business strategy while the local teams tend to believe they know what it takes to win the market and customers. It is similar to the typical tension between marketing and sales team in many organizations. It is ever more a prominent issue for large markets such as China or India. Do you have a global strategy and figure out how to implement in China or do you have China strategy since it is whole different market dynamics? How much do you empower the local teams for key decision making? Does empowerment work in a different culture?

During my assignment in China to lead ExxonMobil capital investment project, we worked with the consulting group started by General Stan McChrystal to facilitate the “team of team” concept in order to have more effective team works between the headquarter team and the local teams in China. It was during those discussion that I suddenly realized that proper translation for the word “empowerment” simply did not exist in Chinese. It is often translated to something along the line of “permission” which has a very different connotation in English. It is partly a reflection of the culture not only in China, but many East Asian countries. While employees in the West are typically looking for independence from their bosses and "ownership" of their jobs, trying to empower employees in China with the same mindset often gets the opposite of what you expect.

During my interview with Keith Hartsfield, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer of I-Robot, he recalled his experience when he was with Motorola managing a team in China. He told me that he travelled to China on a regular base working with the team but the dynamic did not start as he had expected.

“But when I got there, it was like this. I was the big boss guy who's supposed to tell everybody what to do. And the first couple of months they were really worried because I was not telling them what to do. I was asking them all these questions, and they weren't used to sharing what they actually thought.”

This reaction is not uncommon among newly arrived Western executives in China. He wasn't wrong to try to empower his employees. But he didn't appreciate that Chinese culture and history work to prevent employees from taking advantage of empowerment when it's offered to them where there is a natural tendency of deference to authority.

First of all, the culture of deference to authority often makes employees hunker down until they can figure out what's really on the boss's mind, rather than thinking and acting independently for action.

In addition, Chinese employees often tend to be fearful of making mistakes, especially with a new leader or in a new working environment. They worry about inadvertently straying too far from where the leader wants them to be, and they see risk in asking questions that might make them appear ignorant and expose them to painful criticism. Although the younger generations who have been exposed to the western working culture are becoming increasingly vocal, many still tend to be reticent in work place in such environment.

In order to encourage and energize the team, Keith spent a lot of personal times with the team members in order to establish trust and get to know them at a personal level. Eventually they “loosened up and I start to understand what they thought would take to succeed? What they thought success look like? Because my definition was different from theirs in many cases.”

“Eyes on, hands off” is how one of my former colleagues, Dr. Prassana Joshi, succintly described empowerment in a comment of one of my blog posts about empowerment. While empowerment is important in most work places, there are cultural quirks unique to any workplace, and— while it won't be as different as working on the other side of the world as shown in the China example — they need to be ready to assess and adjust their approach to empowerment with every unique situation.

Empowerment is important in a work context, but the concept of empowerment is much broader. Empowerment is really about a partnership valuing self and others, mutual decision making, freedom to make choices, and accept responsibility.

For examples, empowerment of women is considered an important aspect in order to achieve gender equality globally but especially in many developing countries where women are traditionally being discriminated against.

I recently had a conversation with Ms. Ananya Jain, who grew up in Jammu, India and had a difficult childhood due to family situation. With the support from her mother, she was able to develop a fiercely independent mindset to pursue her interests from very young age. At the age of fourteen, she received an award from the President of India for her work on bio fertilizer. She has subsequently been recognized by other organizations including the the Swiss Government and the UK Royal family.

When I asked Ananya the sources of her inspiration and courage that helped her to take control of her situation, she repeatedly brought up the strong influence of her mother on her directly and indirectly.

“I think a lot of that came from my mom, because my mom went through a really ugly divorce with my father. And very quickly I saw that she had little or no control over her finances when they were getting divorced. And I saw the immense amount of courage that she had to have in the indian legal system to sort of come out on the other side, support both herself, my education in the US and then my sister.”

“And I think it is her courage to like, sit up and take control of her life as a child that I observed and that helped me kind of making up my own mind about not wanting to be in control of like someone else or situation. So that was the inspiration. But I think specifically for me how that manifested is. I said, I never want to be financially dependent on a company or person ever again, because I can see how much that sort of like binds you to something.”

That fierce independence empowered her to set a goal for the next fifteen years to find financial independence, not just freedom but at the same time joy in life. She had a vision of “creating something that was joyous for not just me, but for people around me, a company where my employees feel like they're financially free and empowered, make decisions for themselves while they're in my company and even when they leave they feel supported in their financial leave and join another employer.” “I don't look back and think, hey, in my quest to be financially free, and financially joyous, I left other people hollow.”

With that mindset when she graduated with GeorgeTech with an engineering degree, Ananya Jain foundered FullCircle LLC, a global mental health technology startup which has attracted wide attention, including being the recipient of the prestigious The Diane Award from the Royal Family of the UK for her work in creating disruptive technology for mental health.

She and her co-founders want to make an impact on the mental health of Gen X with technology or approaches that better resonate with the current generations. They want to have “an uplifting tone in mental healthcare, a flexible approach, and better communities – especially in a COVID era where social interactions are quite frankly, largely on social media.“

In summary, empowerment is not simply a buzzword. It is all about trust and about recognizing the potential of employees. By doing so, empowerment will increase the capacity of individuals or groups to make choices and to transform those choices into desired actions and outcomes.

If you are a leader, it is especially important to be cognizant of the culture context of empowerment in today’s global business environment. Be present as your team goes through the beginning steps of a project so that members can see first-hand what you mean by empowerment. Be willing to spend time with the team together to mentor and coaching how empowerment could unlock employees' ideas for business successes, at the same time, unleash their potentials in order to truly achieve the goal for empowerment for their leadership development.

For aspiring leaders, you have to be ready to empower yourself to pursue goals and objectives aligned with your values, regardless of your situations, rather than waiting to be empowered. The power of the a free society is to provide that environment for people to explore, try, and learn, but you have to be willing to empower yourself.

I will end with a quote from Ms Rose Hall, Vice President of AXA XL and head of construction innovation. When she was asked about advices in order for women to achieve more successes in the construction industry. “Say yes first and then figure out how!” was her answer.

Don't let the tiny rope on the elephant become a constraint in what you should pursue and what you could achieve.