Empowerment: Part 1 – The Individual. Can We Learn Empowerment? – Forbes

When thinking on empowerment, your first thought is probably about a person - either who you empower, or who empowers you. However, empowerment isnt just about people, it is dependent upon individuals, environment and culture. And within each of these categories, empowerment is about how we react.

Anna Carolina Queiroz, Associate Professor & Postdoctoral Researcher at Stanford University, was one of my guests at a recent round table session on empowerment. She described the difficulty of simplifying empowerment succinctly: it is not only the individual or the environment, it's both of them together. It's a very complex concept, because one reinforces the other.

Relationships are also complex as individuals can be either giving (empowering) or receiving (being empowered). Effective empowerment is similar to effective mentoring. Both require a give and take from both sides.

Giving, Receiving and Feedback

A number of key words and phrases were raised throughout the round table discussion as to what empowerment conveys to different people. Even at a personal level, the points raised conveyed both the giving and receiving nature of empowerment:

Claudia Zuluaga, founder of The Future is 50/50, highlights the need to both give and receive. You need to project a positive energy so that [those being empowered] are able to feel a sense of purpose, Zuluaga argues. But a sense of purpose can be very quickly squashed if people are not able to learn from their mistakes, as Zuluaga points out: In order to improve you need to make mistakes. You need to realize what you did wrong. However, there are many leaders today, particularly in traditional corporations, that don't allow for mistakes and are quick to criticize.

Anna Queiroz backs this point up, stating that we need to know where we are failing. Failure is one of the most important aspects for learning because you understand what you shouldn't do anymore, where to focus your attention, and so on. The environment in many companies, perhaps because of this shortage in the workforce is to praise everyone all the time and say they're doing a great job rather than giving constructive feedback.

The need to avoid disempowerment during feedback was highlighted by Sandra Molies, Time to Think Coach. It's important to see the difference between performance failure and personal failure, Molies argues, there is a difference between not getting something right and being made to feel like a failure. Ill thought out feedback when addressing a mistake or failure at work can lead to shame and huge disempowerment.

The Drama Triangle and Empowerment Dynamic

Feedback is often given by a person in a senior role when addressing a problem. However, in reality, it is rare that a problem lies solely with the feedback recipient - as illustrated by Stephen Karpman.

In the 1960s, Karpman outlined The Drama Triangle. He describes three players - the victim, the persecutor and the rescuer. Many work relationships create a victim (employee), a persecutor (manager) and a rescuer (colleague). However, rarely are these positions static - the victim can become the persecutor and vice versa as each reacts to the other. Indeed, sometimes it can prove difficult to assess who is the victim and who is the persecutor. The hidden disempowering figure, however, is the rescuer. By coming to the rescue the rescuer is disempowering the victim as they are not allowing the victim to find their own solution.

In his book The Power of TED (The Empowerment Dynamic), David Emerald sets out the opposite dynamic to Karpmans Drama Triangle by encouraging individuals to replace the victim with creator, persecutor with challenger, and rescuer with coach.

It is easy to think of the persecutor as a physical person, but much of the time, the perceived persecutor is not a person but the circumstances, environment, or culture surrounding the victim. The context (or circumstances) will shape the environment which in turn will influence the individual. Catherine Gannon, MD of law firm Gannons, argues that empowerment for a boss is going to be, for example, having the tools you might need to run the cash flow. Empowerment to someone who's feeling subjugated is going to be a voice. Empowerment to a prisoner is get me out of this prison.

How individuals react to the context is defined by both nature and nurture. However, are some people naturally more self-empowered than others?

Self-Empowered brains

In a study on self-affirmation (the recognising of ones value), through using a MRI scanner Christopher Coscio and others demonstrated increased activity in the self-processing and valuation parts of the brain of participants who had higher levels of self-affirmation. Whilst this study doesnt examine why some people have higher degrees of self-affirmation in the first place, it does show that self-affirmation and therefore ones ability to feel empowered is at least partly neurological.

So why do some people have higher degrees of self-affirmation? Obviously there is no easy explanation to this, but Annemarie Osborne, a senior marketing and content strategist focuses on values. What are my values? Beginning with integrity, gratitude, responsibility, empathy, kindness, forgiveness and patience - I think that is what truly creates personal empowerment, and these values can't be taken away. In Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl points out that those who are willing to look within themselves can achieve a greater sense of inner peace. This inner peace is not situational and can't be so easily hijacked by other people through the removal of status and entitlement, Osborne says.

Colette van Jaarsveld, Founder of sustainable design agency Arcology links this self-affirmation with self-efficacy (a persons belief in their ability to succeed in a particular situation). Within empowerment there is a sense of meaning, mastering and mattering to others. So if you're on that very clear path, then you have freedom and an inner responsibility that you're doing something that's purposeful, van Jaarsveld states.

Albert Bandura the Canadian-American psychologist in a paper on perceived self-efficacy also touches on what makes some people naturally more empowered than others. He talks about the major psychological processes which affect our self-efficacy (cognitive, motivational, affective and selection processes). As individuals we give different priority to each of these processes, which leads to the problem of trying to provide a one size fits all empowerment solution. As we are all wired differently, we all react differently to actions that may be intended to empower but may instead cause stress. As a CEO, I was guilty of this, by purposefully stepping away from giving direction with the intention to empower, but not providing enough guidance for colleagues to know how to move forward.

How we react to different external and internal influences also relates to how we empower ourselves. The round table participants were split between a belief that self-empowerment is optimised when there is little option than to pull yourself up from the bottom, and that you need a safety net on which you can build. These two viewpoints became particularly relevant when discussing empowerment in the context of cultures (which will be covered in a subsequent article on empowerment).

What is empowerment?

In this article I have purposefully avoided trying to answer what is empowerment?, mainly as it is so dependent upon the psychology of each of us and how we react to other factors that feed into empowerment (including, but certainly not limited to, confidence, initiative, past experiences, and more). But can we foster a feeling of empowerment within children which they can take into their adult lives?

Anna Queiroz from her research on education provided useful insight into this question:

We have some parts of our behaviors that are rooted in ourselves, which the environment reinforces - these are very hard to change. But there are other behaviors, for example, taking risks. If you are in an environment that will encourage and provide the safety to take risks, then you're going to increase this behavior in time. So when we talk about education, we need some sort of structure so that the kids can respect some rules, but where we also give them flexibility to choose different initiatives. This is something some schools have started in the last few years.

As individuals we work, study or play within a particular environment, which is why focusing on the individual alone will always lead to limited empowerment. Part two of this series will therefore focus on empowerment and the environment.

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Empowerment: Part 1 - The Individual. Can We Learn Empowerment? - Forbes