How to understand empowerment?

The word empowerment, heard on several occasions, but has not been careful to take the time to be able to review and think about it, today, combined with notes, but also talk about how to understand empowerment, as well as the application in our work.

? 1. Empowerment in the end what is empowered?

? How do we say the literal meaning of empowerment? Empowerment, can be understood as giving, can, can be understood as the ability to simply look at is to give the ability. In management often heard in the empowerment, I call the narrow scope of the empowerment, that is, the leader to give the front-line team's autonomy in decision-making, in order to be able to cope with the changing environment of the market. Of course, if we split the empowerment into XX empowerment, the meaning of this empowerment will be too wide, algorithmic empowerment, marketing empowerment, tool empowerment, etc., there is a combination of 1 + X trend, we are mainly talking about today down the management of empowerment, that is, the empowerment of decision-making power, how to understand and research and judgment.

There is a saying that a pipe is dead, a loose is chaotic, is our common management scale difficulties, often the point is not a dead value, but falls in a zone. This work is also not as simple as we think, but a very systematic and complex project.

? 2. Empowerment is to deal with uncertainty.?

? ? Ren Zhengfei once said, let the people who can hear the gunfire to command the war, in fact, a concise explanation of the significance of empowerment is to fight against environmental uncertainty brought about by attrition. War is a highly uncertain environment scene, in some terrain, water, airspace environment complex regional war, if not fully empowered, will cause a situation is the delay in decision-making to adapt to sudden changes in the environment, and easy to cause the failure of the war, so from this point of view this sentence is not meaningless.

So why does war require empowerment, and why is this word rarely mentioned in Foxconn's factories? It's because in most highly standardized factories, the process is highly centralized, the producer will break down the complex production process into 1, 2, 3, 4, N steps, and then through repeated experiments to find the most efficient part of each node, and then finally formulated as a standard action, mandatory, each person is responsible for only one or two actions of the entire production, to further improve efficiency. This way, strictly speaking, greatly reduces the uncertainty of production, just like a calculator, assuming that you enter 1 + 2, the result may be 3. In this case, the factory workers only need to execute the action, do not need to know what needs to be done in the previous step and the next, and do not need to care about the overall production process to point to what the product and the goal of the management personnel to set the goal to Optimize the system, set standards, break down the process, this is what we usually see a kind of organizational structure, tree organizational structure, many companies are also so run, just as we draw the organization chart.

? But there are two prerequisites for this. One is that we are working in a system that is highly standardized and can be broken down and repeated, and the second is that the managers have enough information to understand the whole picture at the top and bottom of the pyramid. That is to say, in a relatively static environment, the core objective of the organization's management is to maximize efficiency, minimize inputs but maximize outputs, which is why it is necessary to use standardization to manage. But if in a highly uncertain environment, the primary goal of management may have to change, to maintain rapid and flexible adaptability, the way to achieve is to empower employees.

3. How do you go about empowering employees?

We say that the opposite of empowerment is in fact a high degree of standardization and centralization, while empowerment emphasizes the return of employee autonomy, mobilize employees, allowing employees to make decisions based on the situation. He will bring part of the loss of efficiency, but will enhance part of the organization's agility, enhance the organization's ability to adapt to uncertainty.

Then, exactly how to empower employees, without causing "a tube on the death, a release on the chaos" situation? The core point is to break the original horizontal and vertical distinct tree-like organizational structure, weaving a new organizational form of mesh structure, if the traditional organizational form is a mutual bite of the gears, then the mesh organizational structure is like a small ecosystem, with a certain degree of elasticity and toughness.

? We can be divided into three steps to understand, the first is to establish a high degree of mutual trust in the small team, the second is to let these small teams to form a tight large team, the third is to establish information *** enjoyment mechanism, cultivate information *** enjoyment of the organizational culture. In fact, the first step, "Empowerment" book describes the case of the Marine Corps training, we focus on training for a period of time, *** with overcoming problems, mutual understanding, a person makes a mistake, the whole team punishment, the establishment of a high degree of team identity and mutual trust, and finally form a high degree of tacit understanding into an organic combination of the group, I think, the recent broadcast of the "creation of the camp" and other programs are not also so? There are also a variety of company management training program, in the intensive training to cultivate team tacit understanding, comradeship feelings, to create a team of close objects of the combat atmosphere, and finally bring the collective flow of the heart of the synergistic combat. Each member is able to make autonomous decisions,? and able to coordinate and harmonize, that is, strong and agile.

? So why is it that even though there are many organizations with super-small teams within them, it is still difficult to replicate to form big powerful organizations? It is because in essence, most of our organizations, no matter how flat, will still be a tree-like structure, such as the government's governance system, the various departments vertically in the provinces, cities, counties and villages, such as a business, a variety of departments from the group to the regional vertical jurisdiction, but here there is a problem called interface failure, the author used to be called the business blocking point. For example, in some medical incidents, occurred in the emergency room, the main problem is that the operating room, emergency room, hospitalization department interface process has occurred. For example, the U.S. intelligence services may have N vertical bars, the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, are serving the U.S. government, but each other's information will not be **** enjoy, basically will also be on the defensive with each other, but also prone to cause the intelligence of the jigsaw puzzle malfunctioning, each department has only a small portion of the jigsaw puzzle, but it is difficult to put it together.

How should this problem be solved? To break this deep well of organizational criticism, it is necessary to strengthen the horizontal interaction of the small team, we can choose to send AB departmental exchange students to exchange, understand each other's position and establish contact, in the workplace is a bit like what? In the workplace, it is a bit like what? It is a bit like short-term training, and in the government, it is a bit like secondment or posting. In fact, although these jobs have all sorts of names, the results are good or bad depending on only one thing, whether or not they make strong interactions in the horizontal links of the organization. The strength of a group's **** with intelligence depends largely on the strength of the interactions between its members, and teams that have a higher level of both internal and external interactions are able to generate more ideas.

? The last step is to break down the information barriers and realize information **** enjoyment. This point is the most difficult, but also the most tangled, so the author to talk more. Including the author's organization, in fact, this is also the case, the organization's overall overall information, in the hands of the leadership, grass-roots employees are just executives, will not have no incentive to understand the affairs of other departments, but also do not need to care about the overall system of the operation of the process, if you want to ask, may be the leadership will only say that, if I feel the need to tell you, I will naturally tell you. The latent line is, I don't need to tell you.

Here the deep well of organizational structure, it naturally leads to our information capacity by level, in an intricate, complex, highly correlated system of various elements, the most difficult is, how do you know your role should be matched with what information is most accurate, how this judgment is verified to be the most accurate it. It's like what? You want to play soccer, but you can only see the grass under your feet, but not the whole picture. Thinking back to when I first started, on my first day the leader told me what the full picture of the organization looked like, and which branch of the tree I was on, and was kinda glad to know where I was headed.

This highly transparent culture and information sharing mechanism is very obvious in the corporate culture of some Internet companies, such as byte jumping to agree that anyone's internal OA business card can see other people's OKR, which is a breakthrough that is difficult to achieve in some conventional enterprises. On the surface, many times it will make people feel that there may be a risk of leakage, but in fact, if you calculate the big account, it will be easier to advance the overall algorithm and collective intelligence. Why? Think about what we often say the ability to digitize, lies in the distillation of information into data, data structuring plus algorithmic optimization, and finally realize intelligent solutions and scenarios, which is the most important is the two parts, part of the size of the original information, and part of the algorithm, that is, the value of the interaction of the information **** enjoyment in the sense that we usually mean.

Therefore, the key to empowerment lies in the establishment of small teams with a high degree of mutual trust, horizontal interaction to break the deep well organizational structure, and full **** enjoyment of information.

Golden Words and Silver Sentences 051:

1. How to understand the curse of knowledge?

What does it mean? It means that when you have a kind of knowledge, you can't understand, those who don't have this kind of knowledge, how they think, that is, we often hear, "This thing I've told you so clearly, why you still don't understand?" A kind of knowledge, like a big river, for those who have already crossed it will look back and see that it wasn't very difficult, but they won't be able to understand the difficulties seen by those who haven't crossed it yet. How to solve it? You can learn from Bai Juyi, who would write poems that would fully seek feedback, and if the street dame could read it, then he could assume that he could read it.

2. In long-term investment, cost reduction is the first element and a very important move.

Think of a recent project to do research on a feeling, capitalization investment in large projects, do not do the first venture can try the project, such as we see the milk tea industry, Gu Ming, tea Yan Yue color, hi tea, etc., in fact, are in the third and fourth tier cities first started, because of the low capitalization investment, the cost of trial and error is low, the strategic adjustment and operational flexibility is also the larger, in the financial point of view, the IRR will be The IRR will be more favorable from a financial point of view.

3. Scale is the enemy of performance.

The inverse effect of asset size and performance, asset size is an easy to be ignored by investors, but very important factor, the scale is the enemy of performance, because the larger the scale, to get more than the market returns is very difficult.