About Empowerment

My purpose in writing this piece is to reflect upon a series of conversations in which I participated on the subject of empowerment over the past year. I believe that empowerment is key to innovation. For me, the essential aspect of the paper is my personal attempt to sort out why it is that employers, service providers and governments say they want to but do not reliably create empowerment in employees, clients and citizens. The answer to this question is, I believe, related to the different perspectives on empowerment. Each actor is trying to achieve his objectives. From the perspective of those who have control over tools, resources and authority– employers, intrinsically (self-) motivated individuals, governments–empowerment is usually considered a technique for securing buy-in, engagement and commitment from others to support their goals and objectives. From the perspective of employees, the extrinsically motivated, and citizens, it is more about having sufficient skills, tools, resources, authority and will to set goals and objectives jointly with those who have power. My experience is based on three types of conversation on empowerment: innovation salons, citizen-government dialogues, and personal conversations and reading. The Innovation Salon is a dinner meeting held in Ottawa, Canada about six times per year to discuss public sector innovation. During 2003-04 (the schedule is posted at: www.innovation.cc under Salon), its discussions focussed on employee, client and citizen empowerment. The citizen-government dialogue was a series of meetings held in Ottawa during 2003-04 on the theme “the citizen is responsible for her/his government” (not the other way around). Many but not all of my personal conversations grew out of the first two discussions. What is empowerment, and whose empowerment are we discussing? These key questions are explored in this paper. Typically these questions are not addressed directly. I believe people mean a number of different things by the term empowerment, and have previously described empowerment as a flexible term that reflects the beliefs of the speaker. As a consequence, the speakers think it can be achieved in (at least) three quite different ways: as delegation of authority and accountability, as psychological empowerment, and as power sharing (Glor, 2001a). I have organized my thoughts in this paper around three types of targets for empowerment–employees, clients, and citizens–and I have used the typology of delegation, psychological empowerment and power sharing that I developed to reflect upon what was said in the conversations referred to above.