LAW
3
EMPOWER OTHERS
THE FIRST TWO LAWS of trust focus on personal integrity and respect for others as foundational to building a high-trust organization. But unless leaders empower team members as well, integrity and respect remain inert.
My own appreciation of empowerment took root before I was old enough to drive. I asked my dad to let me practice maneuvering the family car up and down our 100-foot-long driveway. I carefully backed our 1950 Oldsmobile out of the garage until I hit the curb, applied the brake, paused, and then accelerated again. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten to shift out of reverse. Up and over the curb I went, hanging the car up on the berm at the back of the driveway. Try though I might to get the car back on the driveway before anyone discovered my inadvertent foul-up, I could see it was hopeless. So I went back into the house and sheepishly asked my dad for help. He recruited a neighbor and we got the car back on the driveway. Just before heading into the house, he turned, tossed the keys to me, and said, “Don’t forget to put it in drive this time.”
Being trusted after having failed was indelibly empowering. The recollection of my father’s counterintuitive response to my humiliating first attempt at driving has given me courage to try again in situations in which my initial efforts were inadequate. More important, it has inspired me to help others when they’ve failed. I’ve often imagined “tossing the keys” to subordinates whose first efforts had landed them in a ditch. Only rarely has this leap of faith ended in a breach of trust.
It’s smart to empower others. Empowering people allows them to function at their best. In organizations, our best performances are nearly always spurred on when others have empowered us—that is, trusted us with the freedom and resources to excel.
Google’s Thomas Williams, a senior engineering director, offers a great example of grassroots empowerment. Rather than watching people get mired in repetitive, hamster-wheel tasks, he gives them the autonomy, as he puts it, to “build their own treadmills.” Individuals are granted the leeway to experiment, innovate, set their own pace. That way, he says, “No one’s telling you you’re not going fast enough—everyone is telling themselves that. If you work with great people, everyone is setting their treadmill high.” This kind of respectful empowerment leads to creative risk-taking, boosting the chance that people will enjoy their jobs, which in turn will benefit the whole organization.
Trust-rich organizations expect people to become their best—to concentrate more on fairness than legality, more on sharing than advantage, more on action than analysis, and more on the future than the past. With these enabling attitudes come the authority to act and the requirement for mutual trust.
At Room & Board, a national retailer of home furnishings, employees are trusted to set their own measures and priorities for performance instead of the usual managerial review that most companies use. Three times a year, employees meet with management to formally discuss progress. That focus on individual goals results in more getting done.
Room & Board also trusts workers to plan their own employee events, such as cookouts, sundae parties, and a day at the ballpark. It may not seem like much, but allowing the team its own way of celebrating—rather than dictating it from the top—lets people know they’re empowered. Consistent with the spirit of empowerment, Room & Board doesn’t even have a formal policy for sick leave or personal time off.
Some companies have no vacation limit at all. At Virgin, employees can take as much vacation as they want. The only caveat: Make sure your job gets done and the business isn’t affected. ZocDoc, Motley Fool, SurveyMonkey, LinkedIn, and others have followed suit. HubSpot, a marketing and sales firm, describes its vacation policy as “two weeks to infinity.” Says Virgin founder Richard Branson, “Treat people as human beings, give them that flexibility, and I don’t think they’ll abuse it.” At Netflix, founder Reed Hastings mocks “accounting rigmarole” and corporate metabolism fixated on control, instead opting to empower his employees. In summer 2015, Netflix announced that employees with a new child would be entitled to as much as a year off, no questions asked.
Of course, in high-performance environments there’s always the possibility that a lack of structure will generate stress and result in less time off, especially if the guy in the next cubicle never seems to take a break. Evernote, whose business is archiving and note-taking technology, tries to solve the workaholic syndrome by giving employees $1,000 in spending money when they take off at least one full week per year. FullContact, which organizes all your contacts in the cloud, goes a step better. Its annual paid vacation includes not only your regular salary but an additional $7,500 when you take off. The deal has three conditions: You really have to go somewhere; you must not check emails, texts, or voice mail; and you can’t sneak in work some other way. Quirky, a consumer-goods manufacturer, engineers time off by shutting down the company for one week three times a year.
Having workers so committed to the mission that you have to force them to take time off is a nice problem to have. By contrast, trust-poor organizations struggle with giving their teams the latitude to do much of anything. Wary of everybody, they often don’t trust anybody, including even their most trustworthy people. Instead, they rely on compliance committees and tattler rewards to prevent rule-breaking. This suspicious atmosphere suffocates creativity, and worst of all, it stifles the potential for trust to become the operative system governing behavior.
Mistrustful organizations are preoccupied with keeping people from doing their worst, while high-trust organizations focus on empowering people to do their best. Neither trust nor power should be bestowed willy-nilly. As in any area of life, trust should be granted to people with the character and competence to make responsible use of the authority with which you have entrusted them. But everyone should have the opportunity to earn your trust. The results in both morale and productivity don’t take long to show up. But it may take courage on your part to take the small leaps of trust that get the ball rolling.
Long ago, my barely teen daughter approached me with a request I fervently wanted to deny: She wanted to go to a dance with a boy. My wife and I had clearly (or so I thought) established a family rule that our kids needed to be a certain age before dating. Going to a dance with a boy was a close enough approximation to dating that I figured I could invoke the rule and that would be that. To show how much I trusted her, I told her, “I know you’ll make the ‘right’ decision” and “I trust you to make the call.” I was confident that having so overtly empowered her and having reminded her of my unalloyed trust, surely she’d not let me down. I’d get the benefit of showing trust without the risk of actually risking trust. How new I was to this phase of parenting!
I was genuinely stunned when she came back within minutes, thanking me for permission to go to the dance with the young fellow. Her choice meant that I now had my own important choice to make: overrule her judgment and thereby make the indelible point that I didn’t really trust her after all, or support a decision with which I didn’t agree. I opted for the latter, nervously telling her I was certain she was mature enough to decide what was right. It all worked out. She felt trusted—and determined not to let me down. I felt nervous—but committed to make an empowering “deposit” in what I hoped would be an ever-escalating granting of trust.
If the covenant is clear, most people will honor it, but the first leap of trust is always the most harrowing. It requires planting the seed and watching as an always-fragile seedling takes root. And frequent nurturing is a must for the initially delicate bet to grow into full-blown reciprocal trust. Empowering people whose ability to perform you’re not 100 percent sure about has to start somewhere. I’ve learned to take baby steps before people have proven themselves, empowering them in small increments, assessing their character and competence as I grant them authority.
Here are six ideas for empowering people to do their best work:
1. Assume the best. Allow people a chance to prove they can take on more responsibility. If you only grant leeway to those who’ve already demonstrated they can handle it, you’ll never discover new talent. A leader who trusts others to grow—knowing they may trip up—exhibits a level of trust that inspires the best in people and can ignite sparks of trust in an otherwise mistrustful environment. Identifying and empowering the most competent, highest-integrity team members is a great way to start.
2. Be action-oriented. Stanford’s innovative D-School—the School of Design—teaches a “bias towards action.” Tom Peters was famous for the line “Ready, Fire, Aim” in his 1982 book, In Search of Excellence. This notion suggests a preference for trying out ideas, rather than sitting around planning and analyzing. In short, when people are actually doing things, iterating and refining as they go, they tend to get the best results. Empowering teams to act means missteps are less expensive and people learn faster. In some ways, “taking action” is the cousin of “betting on people.” Both involve a gamble. But the risk of failure is surpassed by the potential gain when done in small pilots projects with the expectation of regular project “sunsetting”—the automatic shutdown of a pilot unless specifically renewed.
3. Forget the past. Many organizations do things because “that’s the way they’ve always been done.” An organization’s “best practices” are often just the codification of long-forgotten mistakes. High-trust organizations don’t rely blindly on old rules. Instead, they trust their teams to figure out new, more relevant ones. Empower teams to come up with their own norms.
4. Expect foul-ups. Granting trust doesn’t guarantee perfect results. Inherent in trusting team members with authority is understanding that even the best efforts can falter. When that happens, the team should examine the reasons for the misstep, distill the lessons, and move forward with renewed vigor. Nobody aims to fail, but there’s a very good reason that failure is more readily countenanced, even embraced, in Silicon Valley. While there may be a fetish in Valley culture about failure—there have even been live events like Startup Failure and FailCon to celebrate it—entrepreneurs show wisdom in recognizing that failure may fertilize the next success. Failure is often not the opposite of success, but a preamble to it. (Most would agree that it was Steve Jobs’s failure at NeXT that prepared him for his triumphal return to Apple.) The only true failure is that of character or effort.
Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, has differentiated between good failures and bad ones. “Every child learns at some point that admitting failure means taking the blame,” she wrote in “Strategies for Learning from Failure” in the Harvard Business Review. When she interviewed various executives, she found they were torn. “How can we respond constructively to failures without giving rise to an anything-goes attitude? If people aren’t blamed for failures, what will ensure that they try as hard as possible to do their best work?” The way out of this “false dichotomy,” according to Edmondson, is to distinguish between causes that involve blameworthy conduct—for example, abject deviance or inattention—and mistakes born of complexity or intelligence—for example, experimentation with design or process.
Trusting others means accepting that failure may well happen. Trusting others means not instantly playing what Edmondson calls “the blame game.” That MO winds up making people even more distrustful. As Fernando Flores and Robert Solomon warned in “Creating Trust” in the Business Ethics Quarterly, “Employees can usually tell when the ‘empowerment’ they receive like a gift is actually a noose with which to hang themselves, a setup for blame for situations which they cannot really control.”
Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck has done decades of research on the motivation and productivity that come from what she calls a “growth mindset.” She concludes that those who have been taught to see missteps as only a bump in the road to success—rather than an evaluation of their fixed potential—develop a love of learning, a sense of adventure, and the resilience that provide the basis for growth. Low-trust organizations document assessments rather than developing talent through progressive trust.
5. Eschew the paraphernalia of paranoia. Focus on freeing people to do their best rather than fixating on preventing people from doing their worst. Whenever possible, toss the thick policy manuals—especially when they’re about trivial matters. End the practice of paying employees to turn in their colleagues. Stop monitoring everything they do. Such practices give rise to an anxious mindset that erodes confidence and stifles ingenuity. Nordstrom’s employee handbook is a single card that reads, “Use good judgment in all situations.” If you’ve established a covenant of trust, your confidence in your employees will turn into confidence in themselves and from there to greater achievement, better service to customers, and higher returns to shareholders.
6. Remember that accountability is the requisite companion to empowerment. If power and accountability are separated, mistrust and politics emerge. I once gave an assistant the responsibility to make sure I was on time and prepared for various meetings in my schedule, but I didn’t give her the power to change my calendar. Soon my schedule was a mess. Only when I also turned over my scheduling could accountability follow empowerment.
FOR SOME LEADERS, THE idea of trusting employees enough to share power feels risky. These leaders have never learned the exquisite truth that giving up power is the key to creating a powerful organization. In many organizations, those with the best information do not work at headquarters, but on the front lines. Failing to trust anyone outside the executive inner circle means losing out to high-trust counterparts who marshal talent and experience from deep within the ranks, building broader coalitions and deeper coherence within the team as a whole.
A final note about empowering, trust, and integrity: Warren Buffett said, “If you lose money for the company, I can forgive that. If you lose our reputation, I will be ruthless.” To empower does not give license to breach the values entrusted to each employee as a member of the team.
Empowerment without a clear commitment to values and mission leads to organizational anarchy and ruin. We’ll next see how the freedom that comes with empowerment requires a concomitant accountability for trust to thrive.