Empower to Transform
When undertaking systemic change or facing uncertainty, remember: your employees aren't just along for the ride—they're the engine of transformation.
You've long heard the refrain: transform, transform, transform. And in the face of real-time concerns about inflation, geopolitical turmoil, and an economic slowdown, it's more urgent than ever. The list of short- and medium-term priorities is intimidating:
Underneath all that, you recognize that long-run success will require reimagining your purpose, operating model, and even your business model. But hold on, aren't you forgetting something? Your people.
↗ Read the original article on strategy+business
The fact is, organizational and workforce factors are central to the success of business transformations, and business survival. Making the right moves with your people—and avoiding the wrong ones—enables change and improves business performance. This highlights three such moves, all revolving around a single, overarching imperative: empowering people.
The 3 Imperatives for Change
1. Fundamental Building Blocks: Do workers have agency/choice? Do they feel their work makes a difference? Are they compensated fairly?
2. Resignation Warning Signs: Watch for the lack of a sense of meaning and belonging at work (nearly as important as money).
3. Enable Transformation: Create a culture that empowers workers to speak up, collaborate, and pivot when plans don't work out.
1. The Power of Empowerment
Understanding the 4 dimensions of empowered workers.
â¤ï¸2. Meaning Matters
Why lack of belonging drives resignations and how to fix it.
🧪3. Transformation's Secret Sauce
Harnessing culture & specific behaviors (e.g., Tiered Huddles).
🎬4. Don't Glengarry It
Leadership anti-patterns and what to do instead.
1. The Power of Empowerment
Empowered workers feel a sense of autonomy, influence, confidence, and meaning at work. And it shows.
When workers have power and choice, they are happier, more committed to your organization, and less stressed. They're also better at their jobs, more likely to go the extra mile, and more innovative. So, what's the problem? It's tricky to measure empowerment, and it's too late when someone walks out the door.
The Data: In spring 2022, PwC surveyed 52,000 workers across 44 countries and territories. Researchers investigated four academically recognized dimensions of empowerment to see the degree to which they were important and present in work lives via a dozen specific questions.
📠Autonomy
- I can choose when I work (days and/or hours).
- I can choose where I work (in-person, hybrid, remotely).
- I can choose how I do my work in a way that suits me.
📈 Impact
- The work I do has a significant impact on my team's performance.
- I am fairly rewarded financially for my work.
- My manager considers my viewpoint when making decisions.
🅠Confidence/Competence
- I can exceed what is expected of me in my job role.
- I can be creative/innovative in my job.
- I have a clear plan to advance my career with my current employer.
🤠Meaning/Belonging
- I find my job fulfilling.
- I can truly be myself at work.
- My team cares about my well-being.
Who's empowered? Who's not?
The survey resulted in a simple 'empowerment index' where 0 is the least empowered and 100 is the most.
📈 Most Empowered
A male millennial or gen Z manager in the technology sector who splits his time equally between in-office and remote work.
📉 Least Empowered
A gen X or boomer female working in an office full time—most likely in government, retail, or healthcare.
ðŸ™ï¸ Power centers
Workers in tech, media, and telecom scored the highest on the index, followed by financial services. Retail and government work scored the lowest (likely due to relative lack of autonomy and lower pay).
🢠Location matters
Full-time in-person workers were less empowered than peers who enjoy an equal mix of in-person and remote working.
📊 High on hierarchy?
Management-level respondents scored almost one-third higher than non-managers—the biggest gap observed. Closing this gap must be a priority.
âš–ï¸ It's the autonomy, stupid
Women were less empowered than men, largely due to a gap in perceived autonomy. The 'double burden' of work and domestic responsibilities still affects women the most.
If we want to continue to be able to retain and attract our best talent, we've got to think about employment much more holistically... flexibility, career development, and growth opportunities, the kind of support that we can give them to upskill themselves to continue to remain relevant in the world of work.
2. Meaning Matters
Employees who lack meaning and a sense of belonging at work are more likely to quit.
One of the strongest determinants of empowerment is meaning. Do your people find their job fulfilling? Can they be themselves at work? Does their team truly care about their well-being?
Although money is important, three of the top four reasons people consider leaving a job relate to finding a sense of meaning and belonging at work.
Compared with respondents who say they are staying put, employees who are likely to leave are least likely to find their jobs fulfilling or to feel they can be their true selves at work.
Why people quit—and what to do about it
Organizations have a role to play in helping employees be more engaged, motivated, and productive. Take action:
- âš™ï¸Reduce workplace frictions
Improve processes and organizational decision-making to remove daily frustrations.
- 😊Foster an inclusive culture
Create environments where people can truly be their authentic selves at work.
- âš–ï¸Ensure fair compensation
It's not all soft stuff—pay equity fundamentally matters to your workforce.
3. Transformation's Secret Sauce
Successful transformations often require culture change to make the improvements stick. At the heart of culture change are new behaviors that tend to empower people and teams.
Too many leaders approach business transformation with vague adjectives, abstract nouns, and a buzz saw of buzzwords—as if hoping their own sheer enthusiasm for change will convince employees. By contrast, savvy executives recognize the need to harness organizational culture, the invisible enabler allowing positive change to take root organically.
Connect culture to the business “so what?”
Culture change should never be an afterthought to operational transformation. It must be rooted in business context and rationale—an integral element of the journey from transformation assessment to performance measures.
Link to specific behavior changes
Don't rely on abstract concepts. Define exactly what new actions and behaviors are expected from teams and leadership daily to drive the transformation forward.
Don't fear Plan B
Empower workers to speak up and be completely OK with pivoting when an initial plan doesn't work out.
Smart Practice: Huddle Up! (Cleveland Clinic)
“Running a hospital is like flying a spaceship through an asteroid field: problems come whizzing at you one after another.… [W]e manage this barrage through a method called tiered huddles.”
— Tom Mihaljevic, CEO of Cleveland Clinic
In the book Beyond Digital, PwC's Paul Leinwand and Mahadeva Matt Mani cite Cleveland Clinic to show how employees need a sense of ownership to connect their purpose to the company's purpose.
What are tiered huddles?
Daily structured, 15-minute meetings of multidisciplinary teams. They empower caregivers to speak out about issues of quality, patient safety, experience, and resource utilization. Issues that can't be resolved locally are escalated to more senior teams—tier by tier—within hours.
📉 Reduced patient falls by 15% between January 2017 and August 2019.
Bigger benefits
Huddles greatly increased the sense of community and belonging among caregivers, reinforcing executive support. In one instance, a huddle identified a stressful situation: a patient's family was taking stress out on the caregiving team. The issue escalated to CEO Tom Mihaljevic, who quickly met the caregivers in person, thanked them, and went with the team to resolve the issue with the family—having his team's back.
4. Don't Glengarry It
Want to empower your team? A classic film reminds us what not to do.
It's the 30th anniversary of the film version of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, a brutal parable of business as a dog-eat-dog competition driven by desperation and grounded in fraud. The film reminds us that mismanagement and desperation go hand in hand—most apparent during hard times.
Don't pit your team members against one another
Blake (Alec Baldwin) highlights the dangers of making the office a zero-sum game with his infamous sales contest announcement:
“First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody wanna see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired.”
Don't put compensation above everything
In another moment, Blake taunts Dave Moss (Ed Harris) by mocking his inferior income:
“You see this watch? That watch cost more than your car. I made $970,000 last year. How much you make? You see, pal, that's who I am, and you're nothing.”
Do this instead
Managers keen to avoid their “inner Blake” can learn from a large asset manager that wanted employees to shift away from focusing strictly on individual responsibilities and adopt a team-based, can-do approach.
If colleagues were unable to complete their tasks (due to pandemic lockdowns, family emergencies, etc.), other members of the team would step in. Leaders fostered this shift by prioritizing team goals rather than individual performance.
The Result: To celebrate the changes, leaders encouraged team members to upload stories showing this principle in action. More than 500 stories were shared on an enterprise-wide microsite and highlighted on all-hands calls.