I put in many a year as an IT project manager. It took me quite a few of those years before I learnt that the key to empowering a team is:
You let them get on with the job.
For the sake of brevity, let’s assume that the team is made of reasonably competent people and the team’s objectives and priorities are reasonably well defined.
There are basically two areas which need to be addressed for a team to be empowered and to feel it is empowered (which are not necessarily the same thing).
Firstly, there is no team in which communication and interpersonal relationships work perfectly. There is always value in improving them and a key job of any manager is to facilitate this.
Secondly, it is about the manager deciding to stop getting in the way of the team. But let’s leave that to another occasion, too.
Where interpersonal working relationships have been improved, team members are able to work together better, producing better deliverables more efficiently. Morale and motivation rise. This is empowerment.
It can best be achieved through an employee development programme which focuses on all the ”soft skills” (because they are interrelated). The value of an external agency providing this is that the manager (and, by extension, the employer) usually doesn’t know what they don’t know and the insight brought by external facilitators is, arguably, essential.
Typically, the subjects areas that need to be addressed are those that were developed by Peter Salovey and John Mayer and popularised by Daniel Goleman:
Personal competences, namely:
o Self awareness—being aware of and being able to identify one’s emotions, intuitions and preferences o Self regulation—managing [not “controlling”] one’s emotions, impulses and resources
o Motivation Social competences, namely:
o Empathy—awareness of others’ feelings, needs and concerns [not thinking you can “control” others’ emotions—you can’t]
o Social skills—facility to induce desirable responses in others.
However, teaching people those things is fraught with problems:
o Literally teach them it, and you end up delivering an academic course
o Try to “get them” to be more motivated, for example, and you’re onto a hiding to nothing, because one cannot make anyone do anything.
The issue—and Daniel Goleman himself is not free from criticism in this area—is that, if someone has all five competencies, the following questions are still not answered. Yet, I believe, these are the most important questions:
(1) “Now I am aiming to have these competencies, in what ways will I be, or could I be, a better person? What do I have to do, feel, think, believe differently?”
(2) “If I know the answer to (1), how do I get there?”
(3) “Once I have got there, what do I do then?”
In my experience of delivering a four day programme to junior NHS staff (bands 1-5) in these areas, it was positioning the content to address trainees’ issues that enabled me to reach them. (As Frank Zappa observed, “Just because somebody hears something you say, or reads something that you write, doesn’t mean you’ve reached them.”)
So, rather than deliver a day on “Social skills”—or even talking about their ability to induce desirable responses in others—we did a day on “Dealing with difficult people”. They all had one or more difficult people in their work lives with whom they needed help.
Empowering the team means creating a “facilitating environment” in which the individual, the team and the wider enterprise can all thrive. A key part of the facilitating environment is the nurturing of personal and interpersonal skills (soft skills, if you like).
And a key characteristic of the nurturing is that it provides what the individual and team need, not what you believe they need, or should have.
So, rather against the spirit of this magazine, I argue that “training” is not appropriate here. “Training” is definitely about inflicting on the class what the trainer believes the class needs.
What can be run, though, are quasi-workshops with a facilitator and a number of people in the class, in which the experiences of the class members are allowed to determine the content of the programme. Relevant content is drawn in as and when it is needed to help students gain insights about their own situations and those of others (ie, that’s developing the five competencies).
Luckily, most people have the same sort of issues, so, by and large, most people find it useful to know the same sort of stuff. Most of the programmes I have run in this area have, therefore, been pretty similar. But, that’s my secret. Don’t tell anyone.
