Empowered must not mean abandoned

The most stressful experience in my entire career was when I felt truly abandoned. A very long time ago, I was trying to run a project which was dependent on the work of many other teams - but those teams weren’t interested. The system I was building needed new infrastructure - but the infrastructure wasn’t even ordered. The budget I had inherited was clearly insufficient for the task - but no-one was prepared to provide more money, or change scope, time or quality. And, although I have not always been fast enough to ask for help, this time I did not hold back: I took every opportunity to make sure that everyone around me knew the problems the team was facing and the help we needed, including my boss. But no help came. We were abandoned.

I like autonomy and don’t cope well with micro-management. But the feeling of being truly abandoned was far worse - I ended up leaving that job and have never forgotten the lesson.

Last week I wrote about the mistake that managers make when they confuse causation (‘I gave the team the support they needed and it made them more successful’) with correlation (‘I have summoned the team to daily meetings and they finally seem to be making progress - that must be due to my intervention’). That was intended to be a single article, but James Cole, Chief Architect for the Red Cross, pointed out that it was a one sided view of the story. As well as knowing the difference between correlation and causation, managers and leaders must also know the difference between empowerment and abandonment.

In the scenario above, my boss might have tried to make the case that I was empowered. I was not being micro-managed, and I was free to find my own path. I had a team of smart, expert people, chosen for their ability to solve problems. Surely, left to our own devices, we could come up with creative ways to break those dependencies, find a way to fit within the budget, and scavenge the infrastructure resources we needed. Isn’t it empowering to let people figure things out for themselves? Nevertheless, I felt abandoned.

It can be hard to find the balance between autonomy and micro-management. As managers, we don’t have all the answers, and we can often second guess ourselves even when our intentions are good. Did I trample on my team’s ideas when I gave them that direction? Did I fail to give them support when I asked them to figure out their own team structure? When they ask me to the meeting with the difficult stakeholder, did I mask their voice by speaking up, or leave them feeling alone by staying quiet?

I also think that it is possible to get the balance completely wrong in both directions at the same time. That may sound impossible, but consider the hackneyed management phrase, ‘Don’t bring me problems - bring me solutions!’ (I’d like to think that nobody says this any more, but I bet we all try it out at some stage in our management careers.) It manages to be directive (‘bring me solutions’ - implying that I’ll be the judge of whether they’re really solutions) and unhelpful (‘don’t bring me problems’ - implying that I’m not really interested in helping). Perhaps ‘What do you think we should do?’ is better.

I think that the clue to finding the balance is in the word ‘empowerment’. Empowerment means what it says: not just giving a team autonomy, but giving them the power to do the job, whether that power is expressed in authority or resources. Autonomy without power is a step on the road to abandonment. Our job as managers is to give our teams goals and direction, and then give them the power to follow that direction - in all dimensions. We will not always get that right.

It turns out that this management stuff is pretty hard. I started this article with a story about how I felt abandoned during a difficult project. I have managed many people and led many teams, and am sure that I have often got it wrong: been over-controlling with teams that needed more autonomy, and under-supportive to teams that needed help. As ever, one of our greatest sources of learning is our own experience - and, as ever, I keep learning that I have a lot to learn.