Blanchard, Ken, John P. Carlos, and Alan Randolph. The 3 Keys to Empowerment: Release the Power Within People for Astonishing Results. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2001.

To create a culture of empowerment, people must behave in different ways than would commonly occur in a hierarchical culture. In many ways, this change of behavior involves a movement from dependence on the leadership of others to independence from, or interdependence with, external leadership. This requires a shift in the traditional leadership paradigm. Rather than seeing leaders as directing, controlling, and supervising the behavior of others or even supporting, encouraging, and facilitating their efforts, the desired situation is one where the necessary direction and support come from individual and team initiatives.

People with information concerns don't want to be sold on the change; they want to be told about it. They don't want to know if the change is good or bad until they understand it.

…morale, which is the team's motivation, confidence, and cohesion.

This first stage of the process of changing to empowerment is filled with excitement combined with anxiety and a lack of knowledge of what empowerment means for the behaviors of everyone involved. According to Situational Leadership® II, this stage is a time for providing clear direction to focus people's natural but naive enthusiasm.

Boundaries that exist within a hierarchy and with which most people are familiar tell people what they cannot do.

Now contrast this with boundaries of empowerment that clarify for people the range of actions and decisions that they can make.

Essentially there are two categories of decisions to focus on at first: strategic decisions and operational decisions. It needs to be made clear that strategic decisions will continue to be made by senior leadership. What team members will decide are operational matters, focusing initially on less complex and involved decisions but gradually moving toward more complex and involved decisions.

What good is accomplished if an individual succeeds and the team fails? By tying team responsibility to organizational performance, the systems of the organization begin to support the empowered efforts of the teams--indeed, to demand empowerment from the teams.

It is natural for people to begin having serious doubts about the veracity of empowerment. Team members doubt the leadership's sincerity, and the leadership doubts the people's ability to ever take responsibility for their actions, with team leaders caught somewhere in the middle.

Especially with regard to a new person, time must be spent providing that person with the direction and clarity of how this team operates and how this person must adapt to the team. But the team must also reorient itself on how to work with this new member instead of the departed member. If the two people are quite different in style and skills, the team will have more trouble with this integration process, but nevertheless, it must occur if the team is to stay empowered.

Why not be the best you can be and help others around you to be magnificent as well?