Examining Work and Life Other Reading # 2 - Melinda Re "Organizing For Empowerment: An Interview with AES's Roger Sant and Dennis Bakke, by Suzy Wetlaufer, Harvard Business Review, January-February 1999, pg. 111

Empowerment Sounds Like Fun!

This article is a fascinating journey through a very interesting philosophy of management. The article points out that empowerment, as a management strategy, has received a lot of attention recently. Empowerment is when frontline employees are given the authority to make and execute important decisions without top-down interference. Empowered organizations are built on autonomy and trust. People at all levels take full responsibility for their work and for the performance of the organization.

Many executives claim that they are empowering their employees, but the employees know better. There is a gap between the myth of empowerment and the reality. Empowerment is a false promise in many organizations. The executives of AES Corporation, a global electricity company, consider empowerment a sound business idea and have been struggling with the mechanics for years. In this article, the two founding executives discuss the company and its philosophical foundations.

They set out to create a very different company. The main goal was to build a company that embodied the four principals that they felt mattered the most: fairness, integrity, social responsibility, and fun. They wanted to fully engage people on a daily basis. The employees have total responsibility for decisions. They are accountable for results. The system starts with a lack of hierarchy. The less authority over an employee, the more likely that that employee will make their own decisions. They are organized around small teams. Each team has a team leader. 5 - 20 teams make up each plant. Each plant has a manager. Groups of plants make up regions. Each region has a manager. Each team, each plant, each region has total responsibility for its success.

Every person in the company has to become a well-rounded generalist who understands all aspects of the operation and who has the good of the whole company in mind when they make decisions. It's like every AES employee is a CEO.

For AES, hiring the right people is essential. They must hire people who share the culture. They very rarely hire primarily for technical ability. The real focus is on cultural fit. The teams interview candidates and try to get a sense of whether they will be comfortable in the AES environment. One of the interview questions: "What does fun on the job mean to you?"

Compensation and the performance evaluation are based 50% on technical factors such as the company's financial performance, safety and environmental impacts; and 50% on how well the individual and team understand and adhere to the four values. Each team member evaluates their own performance and the other team members affirm or critique the evaluation. Individuals set their own compensation. With this kind of evaluation process, team members tend to push each other to succeed. They want to help one another to be the best they can be.

Another basic mechanic of empowerment for AES is the free and frequent information flow. People aren't making decisions in a vacuum. There is a lot of corporate memory and employees have access to it. All financial and market information is widely circulated, a fact that has concerned some people about information leaks. These executives think it's worth the risk. They want their people to make good decisions and they need information to do that. All employees are encouraged to voluntarily share information with everyone else in the company who could benefit.

The role of the executives of AES is not that of "decision makers". With the employees playing those roles, they end up spending their time as advisors; chief guardians of the principals; accountability officers both within the company and to the outside world; and chief encouragers. They give the speeches at the five-year anniversary parties!

My favorite quote in this article is, "In our society we tend to treat children like adults, and in the workplace, we treat adults like children. We put them in work environments where every decision is made for them." At AES, they're letting adults take on very big challenges without requiring them to get approval from senior people before making decisions.

What struck me most deeply about this article was the humane way that all employees were viewed and treated. The authors freely admit that colleagues looked upon this idea with extreme skepticism. I ask myself, "Why?"

I wish I could count (or remember) the number of times where I felt I was given a verbal "reprimand" for sending a letter, making a call, copying a piece of paper, etc, etc, etc without "approval" from a supervisor. I once had a boss who insisted that I call him on the intercom and ask him to go to the bathroom. Needless to say, I would not do that and was disciplined by the organization's Executive Director.

I think extension is trying to find a place in the empowerment scheme of things. But sometimes it looks more to me like people are being left out there on their own, rather than are being given the power to make important decisions for the organization. You might be able to make all the decisions you want as they relate to your individual work, but I haven't seen evidence of it all tying together to make a stronger entity.

I talked to two colleagues who share my feelings that there is lurking a deep-seated lack of trust between peers in extension that hinders a free-flowing exchange of information and working together for the good of the organization. Without absolute trust and truly working as a team, I don't believe that the type of empowerment discussed in this article can be achieved.

Wouldn't it be interesting if all of our annual salary adjustments were based on how everybody performed, including the organization? Would we see just a little more support of each other? Hmmmm.

-- Anonymous, February 19, 1999