Choose Empowered Execution
As a shared consciousness is created within a group or team, and as relational spaces are built and maintained for in-depth communication and transparency, we then need to create viable solutions within complexity. However, the challenge is to not just create a solution, but also to execute it in an effective manner, even if it is a temporary solution due to the continued evolution of the problem. This all leads us back to the subject of empowered execution, which is the sum of empowerment and execution.
Whenever I think about the union of empowerment and execution, I am reminded of a quote by Jim Belasco and Ralph Stayer in their book, Flight of the Buffalo: Soaring To Excellence, Learning to Let Employees Lead (Time Warner, 1994): “The primary purpose of strategic planning is not to strategically plan for the future, although that's an important purpose of the exercise. It is primarily to develop the strategic management mind-set in each and every individual in the organization. The purpose of the process is not only to produce a plan. It is to produce a plan that will be owned and understood by the people who have to execute it.”
For me, the critical words in the above are “owned and understood by the people who have to execute it.” Creating ownership and understanding, plus a strategic management mindset, are all mission critical to problem solving within complexity. Furthermore, Belasco and Stayer advocate for leaders to “create the environment for ownership where each person wants to be responsible for his/her own performance.” I would add to this the importance of wanting to create an environment where people want their team to be successful, too. This is not going to happen as the result of a singular action, but instead as a result of an ongoing disciplined course of action. It starts with a commitment to build clarity and ownership, not just to create solutions to adaptive challenges.
The late Stephen Covey understood this when he wrote about the four roles of leadership in his book, The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness (Free Press, 2004). Those four roles are: “modeling (conscience): set a good example; pathfinding (vision): jointly determine the course; aligning (discipline): set up and manage systems to stay on course; empowering (passion): focus talent on results, not methods, then get out of people’s way and give help as requested.” As he explains, “Modeling principle-centered trustworthy behavior inspires trust without ‘talking it.’ Pathfinding creates order without demanding it. Aligning nourishes both vision and empowerment without proclaiming them. Empowerment is the fruit of the other three."
Leadership Choices That Support Empowered Execution
Captain Michael Abrashoff in his book, It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy (Warner Books, 2002) notes that “Empowering means defining the parameters in which people are allowed to operate, and then setting them free.” From my experience and observations, setting people free to execute within defined parameters, starts with understanding something very unique about people who are empowered and execute well over time.
First, empowered people have confidence in their ability and their knowledge, and in their team and their company. They believe they can make the right decisions, and they believe they are role modeling what is most important.
Second, empowered people can make choices about how to achieve predetermined outcomes/goals. As they make these choices, empowered people believe they are engaged in meaningful work that is making a difference in their work place and their community.
Over decades of doing this work, I have learned that empowerment is the process of increasing the capacity of individuals or groups/teams to have confidence, to make choices, and to transform those choices into desired actions and outcomes, i.e. meaningful results. In order to make this level of empowered execution become an on-going reality, leaders need to do two things very well.
First, they must help people to regularly achieve their goals. Teresa M. Amabile and Steve J. Kramer in their article, “The Power of Small Wins” (Harvard Business Review, May 2011), write about their decade of research which included a deep analysis of daily diaries kept by teammates on creative projects. From this research, they discovered The Progress Principle: “Of all things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work…. And the more frequently people experience that sense of progress, the more likely they are to be creatively productive in the long run.”
Second, these same leaders need to improve their ability to delegate. On the surface, this seems elementary, because delegation is classically defined as “the transferring of authority and responsibility from one person to another in order to carry out a specific activity.” However, within the transferring of authority and responsibility, fundamental flaws are often made that cause failure on many levels.
Having spent my career as a consultant and executive coach, who was routinely called in to figure out why execution failed, I regularly uncovered a series of common problems within the delegation process. First, the person who was being delegated to did not understand the problem that they were suppose to solve. Remember awareness of a problem is not the same as understanding a problem. Second, the person who was being delegated to did not have the positional authority to execute a successful course of action. In essence, the combination of the aforementioned two things resulted in commitment without understanding, and responsibility without choice. Third, the person who was being delegated to did not know how to measure progress and/or success. This always resulted in a decline of confidence and a lack willingness to take any risks in the course of action to solve the problem they were supposed to solve. Instead, most people just gave up, and dumped the whole problem back on their boss, the one who delegated it to them in the first place.
But, I don’t fault the person who has been delegated to in this situation. For me, this is a leadership problem, not just a delegation problem. Many years ago, John Maxwell in his book, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow them and People Will Follow You (Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1998), wrote about “The Law of Empowerment: Only secure leaders give power to others.” Yet, I have discovered that ineffective, and often insecure leaders delegate the work, but not the ability to make choices, and rarely the parameters for action. In short, the leader chooses a conquer and control form of delegation rather than a connections and clarity form of delegation. And as a result, the former generates a profound level of personal burn-out and cynicism about problem solving, delegation, and change. However, the later generates commitment and collaboration. As Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan in their book, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done (Crown Business, 2002), wrote “execution is a systematic process of rigorously discussing hows and what’s questioning, tenaciously following through, and ensuring accountability.” It also is “a systematic way of exposing reality and acting upon it.” And this is one fundamental difference between leaders who solve problems within complexity, and those attempt to solve problems and only generate more problems.
To be continued on Wednesday.
© Geery Howe 2026
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