From Empowerment to Enablement
The Transformation of a Manager Into a Leader
In the transition from a mid-career professional to a true leader, many fall into the trap of adopting corporate-speak that feels safe but lacks substance. Concepts like empowerment, authenticity, and "bringing your whole self to work" are slogans rather than realities. Using these tired– and mostly insincere–slogans will mark you out as a follower, not a true leader.
Leadership isn't about the buzzwords you parrot; it’s about the environment you create and the trust you earn through consistent, and sometimes difficult, actions. A good leader is sincere and sparing in his or her praise. A great leader is able to deliver bad news and course correction with empathy and heart, without fear or favor.
Over the next five weekly posts, I will challenge these modern management tropes and explore a more grounded, mature philosophy for those of you who are brave enough to lead:
From Empowerment to Enablement: Why you don't give power; you teach people how to use the power they already possess as their human birthright.
The Authenticity Trap: Why living your values matters more than announcing them. Authenticity is lived and if you are your authentic self–and really who else CAN you be?–people will know it. If you find yourself or those around you talking about being authentic, that’s a red flag.
The Case for the "Partial Self": If you are someone who wears their heart on their sleeve and is happy to talk about any aspect of your life, fine. Well, not really. But you need to recognize not everyone is so open or welcomes full disclosure from others. Respecting privacy and professional boundaries is becoming ever more important in an oversharing culture.
The Neutral Zone: If we are going to have to navigate sensitive topics to maintain team stability, then we’re going to need to have something else to talk about. It’s why keeping sex, politics, and religion out of the office is a leadership strategy for stability, especially in a polarized climate. As a leader you can model these boundaries to ensure every team member feels safe regardless of their personal beliefs.
Trust Through Transparency: We’ve all seen them–the lovely manager who is quick to praise and rarely instructs or gives critical feedback. When someone truly needs that feedback–and we’ve all worked with them– and does not perform or is actively toxic, the whole team suffers. This inability to deliver bad news, correct when necessary and go in hard on bad behavior is the cause of much discontent and failure at the team level. Learn something that few know and even fewer are able to do: delivering bad news or constructive criticism with empathy is a leadership skill that will increase the level of trust that others place in you.
Blog 1: From Empowerment to Enablement: Teaching the True Nature of Power
The word "empowerment" has become a staple of the corporate lexicon. There is a negative corollary: if you can EMPOWER others, you can also DISEMPOWER them. The common narrative suggests that a leader sits atop a reservoir of power and graciously doles it out to their subordinates. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how professional agency works. This is not to say that subordinates should not sometimes discuss permission with their leaders. Consulting with one’s manager in asking for a stretch goal or to go beyond the boundaries of your authority for a specific purpose is always a good idea. But power itself is something each of us has and can exercise in an employment situation. There are always options up to and including leaving our role or finding a new employer. The power to withdraw our labour belongs to us alone.
Power is Found, Not Granted
If I tell you that I am empowering you, the underlying message is that the power belongs to me, and I am merely permitting you to use a portion of it. This creates a dependency. True leadership recognizes that skilled professionals already possess inherent power—the power of their expertise, their judgment, and their role.
As a leader, my job isn't to give you power; it is to teach you how to use the power you already have. It is to establish guidelines for you to keep you safe in utilizing your power, not to grant it to you, like stock options.
The Leader as Instructor
Moving from being a manager–someone with positional power–to a leader–someone who is worth following–means shifting your focus from granting permission to enabling execution. This involves:
Clarifying the Boundaries: People often hesitate not because they lack power, but because they aren't sure where the electric fence is. Clearly defining the scope of authority allows people to run full speed within those lines.
Removing Structural Roadblocks: Enabling means identifying the bureaucratic or resource-based hurdles that prevent your team from exercising their agency.
Building Competence: You cannot safely use power without the skills to back it up. A leader invests in the team’s capability so that when they make a call, it’s a high-quality one.
I’ve worked with both types: the manager and the leader. As my motto in life has always been ‘don’t tell me what to do’, you might imagine the people who had positional power over me had a tough job of it. In fact, they didn’t. My formula was to work hard, establish trust and nail the metrics that mattered to them and the company. Then if I wanted to experiment, I simply told them my plan, got their advice and their buy-in. Nothing is as much fun as a creative side project, aka innovation, aka, skunkworks, as long as it fulfills the prime directive, which in my case was always to focus on the clients. I failed a lot, failure being it was fun while it lasted but wouldn’t go mainstream for one of many reasons. Even in failure we learned and when we succeeded, we won BIG. Note the use of the words ‘I’ and ‘we’.
This is the way to lead your most promising, productive and creative employees. Win their trust, encourage their creativity and give them air cover.
Relinquishing the Command and Control High
Giving power to others gratifies the ego of the one doing the empowering. It makes them feel like the source of all progress. That model is dead or at least it needs to be. Real leadership is quieter and more courageous. Leaders provide the tools, the context, the training and most importantly of all, the safety for others to claim their own authority. When you stop trying to empower and start focusing on permitting and enabling, you stop being a bottleneck and start being the kind of leader who attracts and retains the best people.
Next Week: The Authenticity Trap: Living It vs. Saying It
I started a business so that I could authentically be my authentic self and allow my post Gartner journey to develop organically and authentically while empowering my associates and clients. Do you want to slap me yet? Cause I want to slap me. In fact, that run-on sentence is in fact a joke, in case you are new here. I’m doing what I’m doing because I worked for 40 years and wanted to share what I have learned. I want to make a tiny corner of the world a better place for as many people as possible. Look for next week’s blog to see how I helped many others achieve their career and life goals and how you can do the same.
