The FLIGBY simulation

The FLIGBY simulation highlighted three specific areas where I can use improvement.  These areas are empowerment, delegation, and building engagement.  While I was surprised to see these areas as weaknesses, they do share a common thread that should make all of them reasonable to tackle at the same time.  They all boil down to trust.  With empowerment, employees need to know they are free to make decisions and interpret information within a framework. In the case of delegation, it is important that an employer trust an employee to be able to do the needed work without constant oversight. As far as building engagement, it is important that both sides understand and believe in the motivation behind the mission, which requires trust.

The first step is to understand how empowerment works. Empowerment has a structural as well as a psychological component (Garcia-Juan-Tena, A. B., & Roca-Puig, V., 2019). The structural piece consists of all of the guidelines and regulations needed to get decision making power from the top of the structure to the bottom and is incredibly essential. This is policy and procedure. The psychological aspect is building the buy in and making people understand that a state of constant review of the structural areas is necessary to keep the business healthy.

This is where delegation becomes important. Delegating process review to sub groups is essential. Looking at all of the processes performed by the team and ensuring they make sense is a great way to empower the team to make changes and delegating necessary work. This process is also designed to build engagement by showing the value placed in the opinions of those reviewing the processes.  This achieve the three pillars of the engagement framework of creating space, aligning motivations, and building trust (Schoonover, H.A., & Gret-Regamey, A., 2019).   

This all sounds reasonable so as far a concrete plan to start this process. Over the last month at this new position, I have generated a list of roughly 80 items that just seem to be wrong, whether it is an outdated process or just bad to begin with. We have resolved some as the team has brought them to me but there are larger structural pieces that require a lot more work. The idea was to start a series of meetings where we would decide as a team which were the most important issues and who, sometimes singular, sometimes group, would tackle them. The measurement for success is of course that the list gets smaller. This certainly take care of delegation, but measuring empowerment and building engagement is more difficult. The true measure of empowerment and building engagement is going to be people adding items that they consider important to the list and us resolving them as a team. The real kicker to this constant review process is that it never really stops.  If we ever do make it all the way through the list we just start over because we are bound to have gained some knowledge form the first time that might help us make better revisions.

References

Garcia-Juan-Tena,A. B., & Roca-Puig, V. (2019). Empowerment in the Public Sector: Testing the influence

of Goal Orientation. Public Personnel Management, 48(4), 443-470. 

Schoonover, H.A., & Gret-Regamey, A. (2019). Creating Space, aligning motivations, and building truct: a practicle framework for stakeholder engagement based on experience in 12 ecosystem service case studies. Ecology & Society, 24(1), 269-281.