From delegating to overtaking: the purpose of empowerment

Empowerment is not delegation or buckpassing or abnegation. So what is it, how can you nuture it and help your employees achieve it?

Empowerment is a powerful thing, but one that strikes me as being too often confused with other things. It isn’t, as we would all acknowledge, delegation: delegation is a process by which someone working for you takes on some of your responsibilities (but not necessarily your authority). Empowerment should be a process whereby people develop their own responsibilities – with or without delegation happening in parallel. 

But this difference is perhaps pedantic compared to a second important one. Empowerment is not abnegation. Telling someone that ‘it’s your problem now’ is not empowering, it’s buckpassing. Empowering people – giving them the freedom to at least partly define their own approach, shape their own role, and offer their own contributions – is about giving them additional scope to operate within the organisational context, not about simply giving them enough rope.