This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Carrots and Sticks Don't Work" by Paul Marciano. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What are the benefits of employee empowerment in the workplace? What can you do to empower your employees?
In Paul Marciano’s book Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work, he discusses the many benefits of employee empowerment and autonomy. Marciano says that it’s only when employees can make independent decisions that they don’t detract from the team.
In this article, we’ll discuss the importance of employee empowerement and some actionable pointers for empowering your team.
The Importance of Employee Empowerment
Employee empowerment in the workplace should not be overlooked. Employees enjoy feeling autonomy, with the freedom to take risks and seek novel solutions. Autonomous employees are helpful because they’re more flexible in responding to novel situations and require less management overhead. They provide the change they want to see in the organization, which increases a feeling of ownership in the company’s success.
Autonomy requires trust from above, information sharing, sufficient resources, training, and decision-making responsibility.
Autonomous employees require information sharing to understand the goals of the organization. Only then can they independently make decisions that don’t detract from the team. (Shortform note: this echoes the concept of “Commander’s Intent,” where the high-level goals are defined specifically enough for the subordinate to know how his personal goals fit in, but vaguely enough to be agile and give the subordinate room to operate freely.) In contrast, keeping employees on a need-to-know basis makes them feel untrusted and makes them resort to gossip.
Employees feel empowered when they have the resources to get their job done. They can only feel empowered when roadblocks and cumbersome processes are eliminated, or when they have authority to change them.
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Like what you just read? Read the rest of the world's best book summary and analysis of Paul Marciano's "Carrots and Sticks Don't Work" at Shortform .
Here's what you'll find in our full Carrots and Sticks Don't Work summary :
- How to motivate your employees and teammates to do a better job
- How to know if you're a terrible manager
- Why the carrot and stick motivation model doesn't work anymore—and what to do instead
