Forward-looking manufacturing leaders want their team members to feel that they have the power to help make the company better, no matter where they sit. This type of empowerment is not automatic; organizations need to have structures and a culture in place that will support it.
An empowered team can influence the scope, management and execution of the work assigned to them. Individuals who feel empowered are more engaged and more likely to develop novel solutions to challenges—and overall, the organization has a more collaborative culture.
Empowerment Flows in Both Directions
Empowerment at work has two primary components: structural and psychological. Structural or granted empowerment flows from the leaders down to their teams, giving teams the authority to make certain decisions, like setting group objectives.
Psychological or perceived empowerment is more subjective. A team member’s psychological empowerment depends on the degree to which they feel they have control over their actions and can affect meaningful change. An example of this would be collaborative decision-making in setting team objectives. Leaders must both set up the structures to empower their teams, and also ensure that the team members feel that empowerment.
A Look at R&D Teams
To better understand this dynamic in R&D teams, IRI (the innovation division of the National Association of Manufacturers) and Babson College teamed up. Over the course of four years, we conducted a series of roundtable discussions and interviews with senior leaders, team leaders, and team members at manufacturing companies to understand their dynamics and perceptions.
While our goal was to help R&D teams to be more empowered, our findings can be just as helpful to manufacturers outside of R&D.
Here are the top five:
Teams should be fluid and feel comfortable accessing outside expertise. Team members shouldn’t think that all information they need can be found within their small, static team. In the study, we found that people felt more empowered when their teams were “extended and fluid.”
Expanding a team’s circle involves encouraging people to build their internal networks, working across teams and developing both relationships and additional context about other projects and activities. Structurally, this means moving individuals around and in and out of different teams regularly. Psychologically, team members should be encouraged to seek outside input—and on the flip side, offer input to other teams.
Project leaders need leadership skills training, too. The people closest to us at work are often the ones that most color our experiences. Team-member participants in the study spoke of the need for project leaders, not just senior leaders, to receive leadership training.
We often found that those who were excellent in their technical space didn’t necessarily have the skillset to lead teams and make decisions. Graduated training, starting with those just beginning to manage a project or a team, can provide a better experience for everyone and also help distinguish those who have management potential and those whose skills lie more on the technical path. Key skills to develop include delegation, holding people accountable, managing ambiguity and giving credit publicly.
Create decision-making structures that incorporate flexibility. In R&D, the primary decision-making structure is StageGate, in which projects need to meet certain thresholds in order to move to the next level. Most study participants noted that they were also increasingly incorporating agile methodologies into their processes, and that they appreciated the marriage of the two techniques. What they liked most was having the predictability of StageGate (i.e. if we meet these requirements, our project can progress) with the flexibility and collaboration of agile.
Beyond R&D, leaders should think about putting in guardrails to ensure that everyone understands the rules of the road: how they will be assessed, what metrics they need to track and who is making the decisions. However, within those guardrails, teams should have the flexibility to collaborate, test, reassess and reevaluate as they choose.
Hire the right people for the right roles. In the study, R&D leaders identified the key traits of individuals most likely to exercise empowerment in their roles: desire for ownership, comfort with ambiguity, innate curiosity and a propensity for risk-taking. These leaders used these traits to identify whom to hire for project and other leadership roles.
Leaders considered it part of their responsibilities to develop these traits in their team members. For those on the team who could not be developed in this way, it was also their responsibility to find them productive work.
This same methodology and mindset can be applied across the organization: Leaders must identify the skills they need and then have the mindset of developing those skills within their team, but also finding productive work for those who have different strengths.
Let people know how what they are doing supports the goals of the organization. Not every project will gain the attention of senior leadership. High-visibility projects are obvious. The less-visible projects need to have structures in place to raise the profile and maintain the engagement of the teams involved.
In R&D, this can mean adding rotations so that people move through high-visibility and low-visibility projects. Companies can also use slack time to increase engagement. Slack-time programs allow staff to dedicate a portion of their time to pursuing creative, work-related projects of their own choice.
In parts of the organization where rotations and slack time are not possible, psychological empowerment becomes even more critical. Leaders need to offer clear and frequent descriptions of and rationale for organizational goals and the contributions that these teams are making toward them. Individuals need to have their potential and their value spelled out for them in that context.
Enabling teams, no matter where they sit, to feel that they can affect positive change strengthens the organization as a whole. To do this, leaders must put structures in place to enable the individuals on those teams.
However, structures alone will not suffice; the psychological element of empowerment is just as important. From the top down, leaders can enable their teams by encouraging collaboration, providing opportunities for training, setting up guardrails, nurturing key skills and showing them that their work matters.
