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June 10, 2004
Empowerment
Empowerment eh? Yadda yadda yadda management newage wankspeak eh?
Well, often, yes. But here are three important quotes that did make a difference to me. The first comes with a story attached.
- It was the second day at a new job, where I was working on a cunning project with the help of two people who had very similar names. It was vitally important that one knew every single thing that was going on, and also that the other didn’t. I breezed into the office, all full of plan-of-attack, and rang the wrong one. I told them everything - an absolute disaster. So I went to my boss, as I always had before, to say that I’d broken it, expecting them to fix it. Except they didn’t. They said what’s in this first quote. And I suddenly realised that I could think of ways that I could fix it. And that my boss trusted me to do it. So I came up with some things to do, he finessed them, and off I went - full of potency and fulfilment.
- This next quote is about choices. If people don’t have choices they won’t have any sense of ownership of a project. So only specify things as far as is needed for people to start, and end up where they need to be. If you document every last thing to the nth degree, you’ll get a lacklustre performance out.
-
If someone really desperately wants to do thing x, and it’s within your power to let them have a go at it, why not? People who are doing what they want to do perform better and need less maintaining.
A corollary to this is that you shouldn’t assume everybody has to do a bit of everything. If someone is never happier than when working on quizzes, and someone else is completely in the zone resizing images in photoshop, making them do loads of each other's work will just make them both miserable.
Posted by Tom Dolan at June 10, 2004 04:31 PM
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