Article
– Beyond empowerment
In a typical hierarchical organisation, these fears make sense. If the people that I empower go off in too many directions, do not know how to make decisions, take resources away from other ideas or take too many risks, the result is that I, the empower-er, will look bad. The reputation and respect that I have spent time and effort building will be ruined.
Not only is there a risk that the empower-ees get it wrong, but there is also a risk that they get it too right. If it turns out that they do an exceptional job, they might look better than me – and how might that look to my superiors? What if my subordinates’ reputation surpasses my own? Will I still be needed?
A friend of mine works for a large pharmaceutical company where the organisation is currently rolling out an agile way of working. She works as a manager and had succeeded in helping her team to become self-managing. She was terrified to tell her boss of her success because she had literally just succeeded in writing herself out of her previous role. She fears losing her job.
In all hierarchical organisations, empowering – truly giving away power – is a losing game, which is why we need those cages to keep us safe.
Although these fears make sense for the sake of protecting ourselves in our current hierarchical way of working, they also hold us back from what we could achieve if we stopped building cages. From climate change to global pandemics and beyond, the most significant challenges we face require another level of collaboration. If we want to collaborate rather than build cages, we all need to grab hold of those fears, look them in the face and decide to take a different course of action.
How to get started? Let us begin by reconsidering our relationship with power.
A new relationship with power: a relationship with new power
The fears listed above exist in a world where power grows as you ascend the organisational chart, and you do what you can to keep it that way. A world where there is a finite amount of power, and we must each protect the share of it that we have earned. However, there is an alternative way to think about power; Heimans and Timms, authors of the book “New Power”, describe the key differences between “old” and “new” power:
“Old power works like a currency. It is held by few. Once gained, it is jealously guarded, and the powerful have a substantial store of it to spend. It is closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven. It downloads, and it captures.”
“New power operates differently, like a current. It is made by many. It is open, participatory, and peer-driven. It uploads, and it distributes. Like water or electricity, it’s most forceful when it surges. The goal with new power is not to hoard it but to channel it.”
These are social constructs: our thoughts and choices about the way we interact with each other (our culture) can influence our reality. If we begin to change our view, then our structures must adapt accordingly.
The definitions above can be used to examine our own behaviours. What does your behaviour say about you? Who do you want to be?
- Do you often feel like a bottleneck in your work and projects? Or do you feel shoulder to shoulder with your colleagues at the front line of the challenge you are tackling?
- Are you fearful that others will get credit for something that you have initiated? Or do you celebrate your colleagues for finding solutions that you were not able to find?
If we want to change our conversations, the way we work together and the way we organise ourselves, each of us must become aware of our “old power” behaviours, evaluate if those actions amount to who we want to be and begin to react differently to the triggers we are faced with on a day-to-day basis.
What makes this difficult is that these “old power” behaviours, and the fears that motivate them, have become our default setting. It may, therefore, take some effort to recognise what that setting looks like for you.
Get to know your power triggers and behaviours
Before going any further, we need to get a better understanding of fear and how fear is processed by our brains. Our brains are wired to identify dangerous situations, instil a feeling of fear in our bodies and allow us to respond to the situation without us even having to consciously think about it. This is very helpful when encountering a lion in the Serengeti: see the lion, feel fear of death, cortisol is released to heighten senses, fight/flight/freeze response to get out of danger, return to equilibrium when back to safety. Thank you, primitive brain.
This auto-pilot response to fear works less well for the challenges and uncertainties of our working world: I need to empower someone else to do this task, I fear I will no longer be a valued part of the tribe if I do not personally find the solution to this problem and get all the credit, cortisol is released to heighten senses, fight/flight/freeze response, still worried that I will not be valued, cortisol maintained, fight/flight/freeze response, still worried … See where I am going with this? We enter a state of long-term heightened cortisol (stress), and our primitive brain continues to call the shots: it is tiring, it is emotionally draining, and it is neither sustainable nor an effective use of our time.
When experiencing fear-driven behaviour in a non-life-threatening situation, like at work, we need to learn how to switch that auto-pilot fear response off. In neuroscientific terms, we want to switch from the sympathetic nervous system to the parasympathetic nervous system. The consequence of doing so will allow us to break the fear cycle and decrease cortisol being pumped into our system – and most importantly: it will enable our prefrontal cortex, the most evolved part of our brain, to decide which action would be best to take.
How to intervene?
Discover your patterns
We often do not even realise that we are going into survival mode and that our sympathetic nervous system has taken charge. We need to begin to recognise how it feels to be in that mode if we want to have half a chance of intervening. Think back to last time your actions were being driven by fear:
- How does your body physically feel?
- What feelings do you experience?
- How do your thoughts sound?
- How are other people responding differently to you?
Here is how the pattern looks for me:
Two months before going on maternity leave, I needed to hand over responsibility for a large programme that I had been running and empower a colleague to lead it instead. I knew I had to do it, but I did not want to.
It felt as though there was a ball of energy in the centre of my body, just at the base of my ribs – it was turning and gaining momentum. It felt as though my heart was sinking. And my stomach felt constricted and low.
This is how my body feels when I feel like I am losing control.
I felt defensive, like I wanted to protect my ground. I felt irritable and would snap at my partner for the slightest of comments. And I felt anger at how unfair this situation was. Leading this programme had given me respect from colleagues and clients, and by successfully filling this role, I felt valuable and fulfilled – I had built up power and influence, and I even felt powerful. And now, I am being forced to put all that at risk!
Defensive, irritable, angry– this is what I feel when I feel threatened.
Anxious thoughts ran through my mind: “My colleague won’t do this the way I did it, it won’t be as good …”, “Maybe he’ll do really well, then they won’t need me anymore”, “This is so unfair” and my inner drama-queen repeating “They will probably all forget about me”.
Self-righteousness leading into down-talking myself followed by painting myself as the helpless victim, this is what my self-talk looks like when I am scared.
To be honest, I cannot remember how others were responding to me – I was too self-absorbed to notice (I am working on that one).
With my primitive brain at the helm, did I want to hoard the power that I had built up? Most definitely. Did I want to empower my colleague to succeed in taking over my tasks (and get the credit for them too)? Absolutely not. My thoughts and actions show that I was operating, and being driven, by fear and old power. But is that really the person that I want to be? When I begin to recognise these physical responses, feelings and self-talk, I give myself the chance to change what happens next. A point of reflection enables me to switch on the evolved part of my brain and let that part of my brain guide my behaviour.
Get back in the driver’s seat
What to do when you have noticed that you are being taken over by fear? Ask yourself a reframing question and connect with your values.
For me, the reframing question is: “Who do I want to be?” Do I want to be the person who runs around stressed, acting selfishly and not giving our team the best chance for growth? Or do I want to be the person who is calm, focuses on the bigger problem that we hope to solve and considers what is best for the team?
Having outlined a set of personal values gives even more clarity in answering that same question: “Who do I want to be?”
With my maternity leave approaching, I continued to procrastinate on empowering my colleague until I noticed the stress in my body and realised that I was in full-on, red alert fear mode. I paused and I asked myself: “Who do I want to be?” My top values are love, caring and integrity to my purpose. Would a loving person trust their colleague to do their best? Would a caring person put the success of the team above their own struggle? If I connect with my purpose, can I let go of this fear? It became clear what I needed to do.
I was able to reframe the situation so that giving away this task became more of a positive than a negative: “My colleague will do this his way, he’s a really talented person so I trust the outcome will be great”, “If I let go, then other opportunities will arise for me to grow even more” and “The success of this role is not the same as my success as a person.” I was free of the limitations that I had placed on both myself and those around me.
In the moment when we have asked ourselves that reframing question, we have switched the tracks from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic nervous system, and a whole new set of actions can follow. If we want to be a person who operates in a world of “new power”, then we need to take on our fear-driven behaviour, let go of control and trust the intelligence of those around us. A minefield of self-interventions awaits us, and it will be tough, but it will be worth it for what we can achieve together.
