Empowerment: #7 of Eight Disciplines for Planned Change
Empowerment 
We all have the power needed to create and manage change within the systems (personal and organizational) of which we are members. However, many of us constrain our energy and power through antithetical belief systems. Often, we simply don’t believe that we have choices available to achieve the changes we desire. At times, our concept of what we want to change is too vague to be useful. Or, our energies are too dispersed to be effective. Regardless of the reason why not, what is needed is to empower ourselves. Unfortunately, others cannot do it for us–though they can support us in our self-empowerment.
Here is the definition we use for empowerment: Supporting self and others toward self-discovering their inherent ability to choose their behavior, emotions, thoughts, and beliefs on behalf of fully engaging themselves toward accomplishing their personal goals and those of their systems.
General Thoughts about Making Empowerment Work
1. Believe in your/their inherent excellence, our/their intrinsic worthiness.
2. Find a wider range of choices beyond “damned if I do and damned if I don’t.”
3. Focus on the present rather than the past or the future.
4. Beware problem-solving. Empowerment “teaches someone to fish;” problem-solving “gives a fish.”
5. Offer suggestions only to ensure that all options are being explored.
6. Ask, “How would you find out?” when “I don’t know” statements occur.
7. Support the other person, not our own ideas, experiences, or egos.
Specific Steps to Support the Empowerment of Others
1. Clarify goals.
2. Identify what is in the way of accomplishing the goal.
3. Check that one is operating from sound and current data.
4. Identify beliefs and conflicting thoughts that may be preventing goal attainment.
5. Keep the focus on empowerment rather than the obstacles and other players.
6. Offer suggestions to choose from.
7. Identify the decisions that need to be made among the available choices.
8. Identify the support system needed.
9. Identify a path forward of concrete next steps of time and place.
10. Check to see if the person has confidence in the path forward.
11. Offer encouragement. You’re done!
Marianne Williamson’s poem speaks to the essence of empowerment.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We are all meant to shine, as children do.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
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Learning from Differences: #6 of Eight Disciplines for Planned Change
Learning from Differences
Differences are the only sources of learning we have. Now, that’s a bold statement! Think about it. Can you think of something you’ve learned that didn’t come from something different? Some people think that I’m rather brilliant; however, if you put me in a room full of clones of me, there is nothing I can learn from any of them. I already know everything they know. I could learn from you though, simply because you are different from me in thoughts, beliefs, life experience, etc. If you can come up with something other than differences that we might learn from, please share in the “Comments” areas below!
For the moment, let’s go with the notion that differences really are the only source of learning we have. When used for learning, differences become the precursor of synergy, wherein the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; creativity, where something new is brought into the world; and the new productivity that can come from both synergy and creativity. Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline wrote of “The Learning Organization” which became a popular goal that has only rarely been achieved. Why has such a worthy goal been so difficult to accomplish? Too often, however, differences are used too finitely to determine who wins and who loses. Without thinking too much, who wins if it’s more vs. less, top vs. bottom, or fast vs. slow? Who traditionally wins if we focus on white vs. black or male vs. female?
When stuck in a win/lose mode, differences are the source of wasteful power struggles or creativity-deadening conformity aimed at avoiding power struggles. Too often, organizations overvalue conformity—those with critical information or new or differing ideas are warned not to “rock-the-boat” making sound and current data a rare commodity. The Bay of Pigs and Challenger disasters are but two highly dramatic examples of this phenomenon. New, differing, and needed ideas are too often stifled by our need to be safe within finite organizational cultures.
The ability to learn from differences is a critical use-of-self and use-of-group skill for leaders and other change agents. It will support them in maintaining the systemic, non-judgmental perspective necessary to use the differences within their systems for the learning and synergy needed to collaboratively invent an effective change process. Given our socialized propensity toward operating from the finite perspective, this is more easily said than done. The infinite perspective helps as it allows change managers the support of strong and long-lasting partnerships and teams. Such support is doubly critical when the stress of change has moves us swiftly back to the traditional, conformity-oriented way of operating. With support a speedy return to learning from differences can then be provided as needed.
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