From passivity to empowerment

‘I wish people were more proactive instead of sitting back and waiting for permission’. Business leaders are often proud of their skilled workforces but frustrated by people’s tendency to seek approval before acting or push issues and decisions upwards. As AI tools are rapidly taking over progressively more complex tasks, the temptation to rely on AI to generate plans and solutions is increasing. To genuinely empower people to think for themselves and take independent action leaders need to provide sufficient structure and clarity whilst giving people greater operating freedom and holding them accountable for delivering.

Established organisational structures, processes and ways of working frequently hamper empowerment and some common barriers that reinforce passivity are:

1. 1. A command-and-control style of leadership where teams and managers lack the authority to take local decisions, design their own working patterns or tailor services to their clients’ needs. Watch out for a tendency among leaders to issue firm-wide mandates for example, or to wade into the operational detail instead of letting their senior managers own this.

1. 2. A dearth of capable people managerswith strong facilitation, team development, coaching and boundary management skills. Often promoted into managerial roles on the basis of their technical expertise, many managers lack the expertise and confidence to coax the best out of their direct reports, deal with friction and manage upwards effectively.

1. 3. AI rollouts that focus on automation not augmentation. As this research explains, with automation leaders expect to deliver the status quo with fewer people; this cost reduction approach results in less engaged, less productive employees who are more likely to leave. With augmentation, leaders focus on learning by doing, job redesign and new human-AI ways of working, all of which upskills and empowers people more and strengthens retention.

1. 4. Behaviours that discourage people from speaking up. Too often people, especially those belonging to a minority demographic in their team or organisation, say they don’t feel heard, their expertise isn’t trusted or it doesn’t feel safe to say what they think. Unconscious (and overt) bias and a lack of quality listening skills and self-awareness contribute to this.

1. 5. A culture that rewards conformity over curiosity and learning. When ‘this is the way we do things round here’ outweighs ‘let’s try a new approach’, people stop questioning the status quo and venturing into the unknown and fear failure and blame.

1. 6. Ineffective performance management. Passivity extends to performance management conversations when managers lack the skill and/or will to give constructive, evidence-based feedback and avoid difficult conversations. Underperformers coast along without any consequences, causing dissatisfaction among colleagues and reluctance to go the extra mile.

To counter these passivity traps, it is critical to understand what ‘being empowered’ means to different people.  My extensive research into freedom at work – via leadership interviews, a cross-company survey of employees and secondary research - has identified the 4 freedoms that underpin a high-trust, high-empowerment culture (with nuances and variations across different demographics):

• The freedom of autonomy over how, when and where people do their work.
• The freedom of growth where people can develop their skills and careers in a way that is motivating.
• The freedom of self-expression where they can speak up, be heard, feel valued and a sense of belonging.
• The freedom to do meaningful work that aligns with their own sense of purpose and is unencumbered by presenteeism, politics and performative busyness.

If passivity traps are evident in your team or organisation, here’s how you can address them effectively:

1. 1. With a command-and-control style leadership, encourage leaders to reflect on their own inner working template of what a leader looks like, which comes from our past experiences of being parented, taught and managed. Invite leaders to share their templates with one other and explore what holding on too tightly looks like and ditto letting go.

1. 2. If you have a dearth of capable people managers, invest in a manager development programme that covers emotional intelligence, coaching and facilitation skills, team development fundamentals and how to handle crucial conversations. Tie these skills to manager promotions and progression pathways into leadership roles.

1. 3. In organisations that are taking an AI augmentation approach, leaders learn alongside colleagues in experiential, often playful learning sessions. They also encourage peer-to-peer learning through cross-team AI clinics and AI champions who help less confident colleagues in ad-hoc ways during the flow of work.

1. 4. If you want people to speak up more, train leaders in how to listen up. Stephen Covey’s 5 levels of listening and Chris Argyris’ ladder of inference are useful frameworks as you build skills in enquiry, surfacing the subtext, checking assumptions, motivational interviewing and reflecting back.

1. 5. Shifting to a culture that values experimentation and learning requires a multi-faceted strategy: try offering team-based coaching for a defined stretch of time or shorter interventions once or twice a year; commissioning time-limited experiments by teams to explore new opportunities or tackle knotty issues, measure the outcomes and identify what works and what doesn’t; and introducing peer-led learning exchanges where both stumbles and successes are celebrated.

1. 6. Get grippy with performance managementby setting a high bar and holding people accountable for delivering the ‘what’ and the ‘how’. When colleagues show signs of disengaging, pick this up early and find out the full picture. Sometimes a shift in responsibilities, a temporary change in working pattern or some accelerated learning and a stretch opportunity can make a positive difference. Other times, a performance improvement plan with frequent check-ins and feedback is needed.

When you offer a high-trust, high-freedom environment within clear operating parameters and performance expectations, invariably people rise to the challenge. As one leader remarked to me ‘if the trade-off for greater freedom, greater autonomy, greater decision-making is a collective accountability, then we’ve found most of our people have stepped up for that’. That’s empowerment.

Our sincere thanks to Helen for sharing this guest blog.

About the Author

Helen Beedham is the author of People Glue, an organisational expert, speaker, and host of The Business of Being Brilliant podcast. Her first book The Future of Time: How ‘re-working’ time can help you boost productivity, diversity and wellbeing was named People, Culture & Management Book of the Year at the Business Book Awards and she regularly comments on the future of work in national, business and HR press.