Barriers to Empowerment

People’s capacity to achieve is often determined by their leader’s ability to empower. The empowerment leadership model shifts away from positional power. With the empowerment model, all the people are given leadership roles so they can contribute to their fullest capacity. Only empowered people can reach their potential. When a leader can’t or won’ empower others, he creates barriers within the organization that people cannot overcome. If the barriers remain long enough, then the people give up, or they move to another organization where they can maximize their potential. Leaders frequently violate the Principle of Empowerment for the following reasons: 1. Desire for Job Security: The primary enemy of empowerment is the desire for job security. A weak leader worries that if he helps his subordinates, he will become dispensable. The paradox is that the only way to make yourself indispensable is to make yourself dispensable. In other words, if you are able to continually empower others and help them develop so that they become capable of taking over your job, you will become so valuable to the organization that you become indispensable. 2. Resistance to Change: Nobel Prize winning author John Steinbeck once stated, “It is the nature of man as he grows older to protest against change, particularly change for the better.” By its very nature, empowerment brings constant change because it encourages people to grow and innovate. Stated another way, a leader may occasionally have to “kill his own baby.” Change is the price of progress. 3. Lack of Self-Worth: Many people gain their personal value and esteem from their work or their position. Threaten to change either of them, and you threaten their self-worth. But to those who have confidence in themselves, change is a stimulus because they believe one person can make a difference and influence what goes on around them. These people are the doers and motivators. They are also empowerers. The best leaders have a rock-solid sense of self-worth.