Downward Innovation
Is this what you meant by employee empowerment?
Some time ago, I sat transfixed as an industrial operations leader explained to a large group of employees that they would no longer be provided with checklists and procedures. Going forward they would learn to be “entrepreneurial,” and do their jobs without such “authoritarian” tools.
This paradigm was confirmed by a machine operator who told me on another occasion that in their area, they did not use procedures to start equipment, while “over there” in another area, their brutally authoritarian supervisor made them turn in various check sheets.
Both areas had an issue that was overloading certain bearings, resulting in serious maintenance expense and downtime. When investigation brought to light the role of the equipment startup procedure in overloading the bearings, guess which area was better able to institutionalize the new knowledge?
The day that the operations leader spoke about entrepreneurship, I was transfixed because I had been communicating the opposite message to many of these employees for weeks!
In another interesting situation, a new procedure was developed for doing a dangerous task. The new procedure was clearly better for safety and for the equipment. Safety incidents had resulted from doing the procedure the old way. However, it did take longer to perform the task, and the task was generally performed under time pressure. Yet, the environment where the new procedure was introduced was one in which challenge was encouraged when new procedures were inferior.
What should an entrepreneurial employee have done when the new procedure was introduced and explained? Some employees embraced it. Others ignored it. There were no consequences for those who neither followed it nor challenged it.
Did the executive leadership have such situations in mind when they spoke of decision rights and innovation? I highly doubt it.
One fascinating development related to the movement to empower employees has been what I have termed “downward innovation.”
Typically, when leaders speak of innovation and entrepreneurship, they are referring to implementing employee ideas on completing tasks more effectively, with less waste and redundancy, and to higher standards of quality. As owners of the means of production, the theory goes, employees will be have a strong incentive to ensure their livelihood, often in the form of equipment, stays working.
Yet, newly “empowered” employees sometimes do the opposite. Rather than raise standards, they decide to lower them. Rather than taking extra time to do a job, they use their new authority to take shortcuts… and then resist change when new knowledge reveals better ways of producing.
None of this is to say that empowering employees with decision rights is the wrong thing to do. The question of how much authority to give an employee requires systems thinking, rather than right-wrong blanket decisions. Here are a series of questions to ask when considering shifting decision rights to employees:
- What’s the objective: is it more important to do the job right—with resulting improvements in safety and reliability—or is it more important to shift decision rights somewhere?
- What are the employees capabilities? What is the plan for any needs identified?
- What are the potential problems with the change and how do we address it?
- Where does the employee go for help in the early stages when they will probably need it?
- What are we trying to achieve? How is that to be measured? Is there a reasonable plan with targets and expectations that can and will be monitored?
- Does the initiative help or hinder institutional learning? If the work processes are not followed, they can not be improved. As a starting point, leaders must have the conversation and acknowledge this tradeoff.
What would you do to avoid Downward Innovation?
No related posts.
No comments yet.