was a time of crisis for U.S. industry. In the early 1980s, Ford Motor Company set an all-time record for losses by a major U.S. corporation. Harley-Davidson was three months from bankruptcy. The Japanese were producing quality products; the United States was not. It was a time of recession, financial crises, and growing unemployment.
One response to these difficulties was to focus on improving the quality of U.S. products and services. The quality movement accelerated and one dimension of that wave was that organizations began to look to their employees to improve the products and services. Quality control had traditionally been a staff function, meaning third parties examined the output of line workers to make sure they achieved quality standards.
A shift in thinking was needed. The shift–initiated by experts like Edwards Deming, Tom Peters, the Association for Quality and Participation, and many more–put quality in the hands of the workers. This gave rise to Quality Circles, Employee Involvement, Participative Management, Team Building, and Sociotechnical Systems. These approaches had one thing in common: They believed that the lower level employees, with some support from above, had the ability to right the ship. The idea of engaging line people close to the work was the centerpiece of the economic recovery. It worked. U.S. companies emerged from their low point and, as iconic examples, Ford Motor Company made an enormous recovery, and Harley-Davidson became profitable again and achieved one of the strongest brand loyalties in the world, much of it based on the employee-created quality of the product.
This was the context out of which the first edition of The Empowered Manager was written. The book validated the shift in control from top management to people closer to the work. It offered an alternative to the patriarchal leadership beliefs that achieved dominance with the rise of the industrial era. Before the book, the word empowerment was rarely used in a workplace setting. As the book was published, the idea was becoming popular as a way of capturing what was already occurring in the most progressive, and desperate, organizations.
Like many social movements, empowerment had its moment in the sun, from the mid-1980s until the early 1990s. The idea became popular, it was widely adopted, and business enterprises, government agencies, schools, hospitals, and other organizations listed empowerment as one of their core values. Whether the adopters believed in it or not, empowerment became part of the mainstream narrative.
That era has passed. As organizations began to believe the quality of their products and services was competitive, and the U.S. economy was solid again, the attention turned from best utilization of people to dominating markets and reducing the cost of labor. The top leaders, who were once chosen from marketing and manufacturing, then were chosen from finance.
So, why reintroduce the ideas of empowerment almost 30 years later?
The world is a different place now.
Markets have changed and become global. Technology has transformed the workplace. We work long distance and at home. Many functions that were once embedded in our institutions have been outsourced. We live in the romance of disruption, where whole industries are being turned on their heads. I rent my bedroom to a stranger and put a dent in the hotel business; I rent my car through Uber and Lyft and dent the taxi industry; I mortgage my house online and dent the bank; I shop online and my neighborhood stores are gone. My contact list, news, facts to be checked, and what my friends had for dinner tonight are all in my pocket, on my smartphone.
This market and business revolution determines how we manage and organize organizations that can be successful in adapting to all of this change. It has produced increasing pressure to cut costs, reduce labor costs, merge functions and institutions, and commodify our relationships with employees. In fact, they are no longer called employees; they are talent. Human Resources has become Talent Management.
Smaller, leaner, faster, agile mantras drive most work cultures. Business is now about the money. Government is now about lowering costs and privatizing as much as you can. Schools seeking reform are now about more technology, better measurement, standardized curricula, and racing to the top. Hospitals are growing into empires.
Customer service, a major calling card for the 1980s, has now mostly been automated. Every organization is driving us to contact them online, and the largest continuous concert in the country occurs while we wait for a human being to answer our 1-800 calls. The depersonalization of service has gone so far that some organizations advertise proudly that if you call them, a human being will talk to you. Just providing an actual person, to pick up the call sooner, is now a competitive advantage.
With all that has changed–with this culture increasingly enamored with convenience and speed, artificial intelligence, robots, online everything, and frictionless (meaning no humans) transactions–where is the employee now? Are employees even really needed now?
People are needed. And how we lead and manage them still matters, just perhaps not as much, and not in the same way. Michael Levie, who runs the CitizenM contemporary hotel chain, has an interesting slant on the place of people in a technologic age. He is investing in as much technology as possible in his hotels. Automatic kiosk check-in, iPads in the rooms so guests have one-touch control of the environment, including draperies, sound, TV, lighting, communication, and even what kind of art they would like on the wall. There is also extensive electronic monitoring so management can track hotel operations: how clean a room is, when it was cleaned, how long it took to clean it, the lighting, the food preparation, labor scheduling, the customers' TV and temperature preferences. Everything except what customers do in the room.
Here is the point: Levie says that all the technology serves to unburden the hotel employees from many of the repetitive functions of running a property in order to free them to maximize positive experiences for hotel guests. The idea is that if the hotels create a satisfying work environment for staff, they eventually have a similar impact on their suppliers. In other words, if the staff experience is satisfying, the customer experience will follow suit. Therefore his goal is to make jobs fun and interesting. Every morning the staff has a meeting to decide who will do what that day. Each member of the staff (they are called ambassadors) becomes trained in all functions: reception, room management, food and beverage service, bartending, group sales, and bookings. There is one specialist in the house: the maintenance person. The rest of the ambassadors get what we used to call job enrichment–and what we might now call empowerment. And it works. Turnover is one-third the industry average, and recruiting is a buyer's market.
The meaning of this is that no matter what realities work to make employees less important, or redundant, or temporary, or more marginal, there is always an opportunity and a need to create a culture that positively impacts performance, builds accountability, and is rewarding for everyone in the food chain, executives included.
The answer to the question of why empowerment and why now is that there is the need to organize human effort, despite any disturbance to the surface waters by radical innovation, modern tectonic shifts, technological innovation, marketplace expansions and contractions, cultural volatility, and all the science we can finance that is determined to replicate human beings and thereby replace us. There is a persistent requirement to care for the human being, even as they make themselves obsolete.
As managers, we hold a set of assumptions and beliefs about what makes for a productive and purposeful human system. These assumptions revolve around how much choice and control and value to give to people in an organized work setting, all of which are decisive in determining the nature of our workplace. And what is striking after a longish view of the workplace landscape over four decades is that the beliefs about organizing human effort have seen little change.
Most of our organizations are still functioning as though people were commodities and just another form of asset. Our contemporary organizations still believe that the vision comes from the top. That talent has to be carefully managed. That pay systems drive performance. That what you measure is what you get and that the future needs to have a
