Empowering the hopeless

Sometimes "empowering" people means setting them up to fail.

"Empowerment" is a buzzword these days. We are expected to empower people. Staff complain of not being empowered, not given the opportunity to shine, to show their abilities. The cruel system holds them down. That is often not the case.

The reality is that usually these individuals are "held back" because they don't have the capability to meet the expectation, not because the system is strangling them. Sometimes that can be addressed by teaching them knowledge or training up their skills, which takes time and resources to do but should be done. Many under-performing people simply don't have the ability and all the development in the world isn't going to fix that, or if it does it will take years. Their self-belief is admirable but not a solution.

Caught in the clutches of political correctness, we end up "empowering" people who simply cannot do the job, then committing precious resources to covering for them to protect the organisation from their actions.

I came up against this in setting out my Standard+Case model. Like Agile and Devops and a number of other approaches, S+C depends on multi-skilled professional people. Unlike Agile and Devops, S+C doesn't depend exclusively on such wunderkinder. S+C uses the talented staff to be case workers, but S+C also accepts that not everybody is ready to be a case worker. Others work on standardised responses which have a documented workflow that can be taught (and controlled). sulk Some staff may grow into a case worker role with time and development, others never will. I've detected a level of discomfort in some managers when they hear this, when they realise they need to break it to their staff that "not everybody gets a gold swimming medal just for jumping in the pool".

Business (commercial or public service) is not the agent of society to fix all its ills. Business is about the ruthless art of the possible. All organisations exist to fulfil a mission. If that mission isn't housing and improving the weak then that isn't the mission.
We're not here to provide a sheltered workshop or a rescue service for under-developed people. If their parents and schooling (and genes) failed them, it is not an organisation's duty or role to fix that.

We develop those who genuinely have the potential. Not everybody wins that prize. The fairest thing to do in the long run is to tell them they don't have it, and not hold out false hope. And don't place them into positions where they do more harm than good out of some misplaced sense of kindness, charity, or idealism. Squeamishness in confronting this issue only hurts everybody, including the individual.

Sometimes we are not sure or don't have the confidence in our assessment. in that case by all means give people a go, but be prepared to deal with the situation and repair the damage if they don't cope.

Sure managers are wrong about that assessment at times, especially when racism, sexism, and age-ism get in the way. In that case the individual can fight to prove their bosses wrong or - my preference - get out and go somewhere where their abilities are recognised.

Whatever the action and response, pretending people are something they are not is just bad business.

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