Book Summary: Empowerment Takes More Than a Minute – By Ken Blanchard, John Carlos, and Alan Randolph
Customer loyalty is the gold standard for any business. Loyal customers have a higher life value, recommend more businesses, and become advocates. They won’t buy or drop you on the price and they’ll give you another chance if you’re wrong. Customer satisfaction is not the same. Satisfied customers don’t necessarily buy again. The Holy Grail for any business is creating loyal customers. There is a catch. You can’t build loyal customers without committed employees.
Why is this important to me?
I am not doing this summary to waste your time. My vision is to provide concise action steps that you can take right now to improve your life. People spend more than 30% of their time on work-related tasks. This is the time spent away from family, friends, and other activities. Gallup shows that 91% of employees are either offline or actively disconnected, which means they hate their job.
One of the main causes of disengagement is the fact that management does not trust its people. This is horrible because customers want action right now and if your front-line staff are not trained to make decisions, then this process becomes complicated very quickly and causes customer frustration.
It is part of human nature to want to do a good job. If you had to choose, would you like to do ordinary work or magnificent work? Everyone wants to do a good job, but most people are in the wrong places, so they have to use their weaknesses as their main strengths. Management has the wrong people in the wrong jobs.
Empowerment takes more than a minute is a short book with a good message. I will discuss some of the main points in this summary.
1. Empowerment: Empowerment is simply allowing people to do what they already know how to do. People want to do a good job but are afraid because they are not empowered. Sharing information is a key step in starting an empowered organization.
2. Job insecurity – Managers sometimes feel that if they give people too much power, they will be out of work. I’ve seen it in every department throughout my career. It doesn’t matter if it’s Sales, Service, or Development, people pile up workloads to protect themselves. The leader’s job is to craft the vision so that people understand that as they leave some job, they will get additional work as the company expands and grows.
3. Autonomy: people want autonomy and freedom to do a good job. The problem becomes a balancing act because management generally wants to maintain some control over their direct reports. The way to avoid this is to define what is expected in terms of goals and performance for your people and communicate the relevance of what they do. Each team member should have a personal scorecard that measures their tasks every day.
4. Teams: the authors speak of self-directed teams. I agree that the hierarchy needs to be lowered and I would make a caveat about teams. They must be responsible, defined and small. Large teams will become grossly inefficient simply under the burden of communications. Small teams are much more effective and should be kept to 5 people or less.
Empowerment is something that can transform an organization if used correctly. This book is a good guide to why it is important. Implementing a culture like this takes work. We are in the process of taking this further in our software business. The first thing we did was work with each member of the team and communicate the relevance of their role and ask them for things that they could measure every day. All of our departments have weekly dashboards, but sometimes the individual measures for each job are different than the department measures.
I hope this short summary has been helpful to you. The key to any new idea is to incorporate it into your daily routine until it becomes a habit. Habits are formed in just 21 days. One thing that you can take away from this book is the individual dashboards. Engaging your people about the relevance of each job and theirs in particular is a great start, and the individual scorecard will allow them to keep track of the important measures of their work.