Balancing Empowerment and Accountability Is Vital in Team Management

Employee empowerment can be a powerful tool for improving efficiency, innovation and employee retention, but it's just half of a winning team strategy

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  By Mark Frissora

Business requires balance. For example, a healthy work schedule requires a dynamic relationship between the amount of time spent on cost-saving and revenue-boosting initiatives, and leaders are often guilty of overemphasizing one or the other. As the saying goes, you can’t shrink your way to prosperity, yet a fixation on chasing growth can also be unprofitable. The role of senior leadership is to make sure that these efforts are in proportion.

Another vital balance to achieve is between empowerment and accountability. In my more than 40 years of leading businesses, I’ve learned that employee empowerment can be a powerful tool for companies seeking to improve efficiency, innovation, and employee retention, but have also learned how disastrous it can be when empowerment is not balanced with accountability.

The Essence of Empowerment

At its core, empowerment is about giving employees control over how they carry out their roles. Picture Henry Ford’s employees standing at their posts on the Dearborn assembly lines of the late 1920s. Company success depended on each doing one thing in a precise way at a precise time, with little to no room for creativity or innovation. While most businesses do not require that level of control, it’s not uncommon to require employees to complete processes that have been developed exclusively by their managers. When that’s the culture, feedback is usually not welcomed and innovation not expected—not an environment of empowerment.