Delegation versus empowerment: What, how, and is there a difference?
The Health Care Supervisor
Gaithersburg
Sep 1995
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Authors: McConnell, Charles R
Volume: 14
Issue: 1
Start Page: 69
ISSN: 07313381
Subject Terms: Total quality
Supervision
Problems
Health care industry
Employee empowerment
Delegation of authority
Classification Codes: 9190: US
8320: Health care industry
6100: Human resource planning
2200: Managerial skills
Geographic Names: US
Abstract:
Delegation, or empowerment, represents the essence of the supervisory task:
getting things done through people. The terms are no different from each
other; empowerment is simply delegation done properly. The process still
fails for the same old reasons, and failure still causes the same kinds of
problems. Delegation or empowerment involves authority; it is authority that
is delegated, not responsibility, as commonly claimed. Under either name
it is an imperfect process requiring subjective judgments and chronic risk.
Although either label is acceptable - the few differences between delegation
and empowerment are semantic only - the significant constant that must be
present is a sense of task ownership on the part of the empowered employee.
Copyright Aspen Publishers, Inc. Sep 1995
Full Text:
JANET, the unit manager of the radiology department of Community Hospital,
felt she was experiencing work overload in a number of respects. The unit
had recently been expanded physically and in the number of technologists
and support staff, and the hospital had recently launched an all-employee
educational effort as part of the implementation of total quality management
(TQM).
As part of her TQM education, Janet had recently heard a great deal about
employee empowerment. She rather casually wondered how empowerment differed,
if at all, from delegation. Delegation she accepted as a fairly basic management
process she believed herself to have been practicing for as long as she had
been in management.
To help deal with her perceived overload and also to help expand staff members'
capabilities, Janet decided to delegate the data-gathering for the department's
monthly activity report. She selected Allen, a technologist of several years
who seemed capable and who had sufficient time available. Janet instructed
Allen in how to approach the task. Allen had no questions about what he was
supposed to do, and he expressed no feelings one way or the other about picking
up this particular task. Janet told Allen that she needed his first rough
figures in two days.
Three days later Janet had not received any numbers. When asked, Allen told
her he had not had the chance to do it but he would get it started right
away. He seemed in no particular hurry to tackle the report. That same day
Janet accidentally overheard a portion of a conversation between Allen and
another technologist in which Allen said, "...her lousy statistics, and I
think she ought to do it herself. After all, it's her job, not mine."
Janet found herself thrown into doubt about what she was supposed to be doing
as a manager and especially about how she might be expected to change her
approach to certain management processes under TQM. She felt she had delegated
as she had always done. Sometimes it worked, but sometimes it failed and
she had to try again with a different employee. She began to wonder whether
she was missing something about this thing called "empowerment," and all
at once her lack of instant success with Allen caused her to feel inadequate
as a manager.
Janet had fallen into one of the more common traps of the TQM era. She had
been distracted by labels that left her confused about the nature of some
basic management processes.
GETTING THINGS DONE THROUGH PEOPLE
The basic task of supervision, often cited as a simple definition of management,
is getting things done through people. If the supervisor could accomplish
all of the work of the department alone, there would be no need for other
employees. However, because the supervisor is responsible for ensuring the
completion of more work than can be done alone, it is necessary to place
some of that work in the hands of others.
It follows also that the supervisor is ordinarily not the only person in
a group who is capable of planning, thinking creatively, making decisions,
and generally behaving responsibly. There is, within any given work group,
a wealth of capability that will be largely wasted if it is allowed to lie
undeveloped.
Because there is often more work to be done than a single person can do,
work is given out--delegated--to various members of a work group. For a number
of reasons having to do with efficiency and consistency, a single individual,
a member of the broad class of employees known as "management," is made responsible
for seeing that the work gets accomplished.
Work is delegated in different ways, the most fundamental of which we rarely
think of as "delegation." In its most basic form, delegation occurs when
an individual is assigned a job to do on some regular basis. If, for example,
supervisor Jane says to billing clerk Susan, "Your job is to operate this
terminal and follow this procedure and produce bills that will then be mailed
out," Jane is giving Susan the authority to do a given amount of work for
which Jane is responsible. Jane is delegating to Susan, although this may
be described as structural delegation, because it involves communicating
the basic elements of a job to an employee.
We generally think of delegation in terms of assigning an employee tasks
that lie outside of that person's job description, that is, beyond the understood
structure of the job. Thus we ordinarily regard delegation as involving the
assignment of something "extra" to an employee. By delegating we are asking
employees to do things that by and large may not be perceived as part of
their regular assignments.
Most people working in management believe they understand delegation and
practice it regularly. Delegation has been talked about and written about
for as long as management has been considered a legitimate pursuit in its
own right. Why, then, does it appear that we have traded in the concept of
delegation for something called "empowerment?"
DELEGATION "OUT," ENPOWERMENT "IN?"
Technically, delegation and empowerment are the same. As may be verified
in any comprehensive dictionary or thesaurus, the two words are actually
synonyms for each other. Therefore, any differences between them are largely
perceived differences, brought about mostly by years of misuse of "delegation"
and the present overuse, misuse, and abuse of "empowerment" as one of the
"in" terms of present day management and more specifically as part of the
language of TQM.
Delegation is both a process and a condition. It has long been seen as the
process only, the act of handing off an assignment to a subordinate. In fact,
some of the more complete thesauruses even list the phrase "passing the buck"
as one of the more loosely applied synonyms for delegation. What has happened
all too often is that an assignment is simply passed to a subordinate who
is not adequately prepared to take it on. Proper delegation requires preparation
that includes not only complete instruction but also conscientious attention
to issues of employee motivation. Proper delegation takes time, but more
often than not managers hand off assignments to subordinates under the pressure
of limited time. It is under time pressure when the manager is most likely
to feel the need to delegate, but it is the wrong time to attempt to do so.
The condition of delegation, under which an employee incorporates new tasks
and expands in knowledge and responsibility, is neither more nor less than
what people are presently referring to as empowerment. However, because of
years of misunderstanding and improper use, the word delegation has become
tarnished, and for a great many people it is apparently tarnished beyond
all redemption. Another, shinier term was required.
There is a phenomenon at work that one might describe as The Great Management
Word Game. This is surely related to some extent to the political correctness
movement in which terms that are more generally acceptable replace others
that have accumulated some baggage. Thus we speak of "re-engineering" or
even "re-inventing" the corporation, even though the descriptions of down-sizing,
right-sizing, or reorganizing previously reflected the essence of the same
process. Similarly many now contrast the synonymous words management and
leadership as though the differences they would attribute to these terms
were actually real. (A seminar brochure recently proclaimed, "Be a leader,
not just another manager".)
Similarly, it is possible to clearly identify the essence of today's total
quality movement under four or five labels applied to past quality improvement
efforts. A label, however, does not define the process or guarantee that
it will be properly applied. If a process is not being effectively applied,
calling that same process something else will do nothing to ensure its proper
application. In concept, re-engineering is simply reorganizing done correctly;
leadership is no more than management done correctly; empowerment is no more
than delegation done correctly. Delegation became tarnished because of chronic
misuse and abuse. If not conscientiously applied, the term empowerment will
become similarly tarnished.
The essence of a process lies not in what it is called but rather in how
it is applied.
DELEGATION FAILURE: A COMMON OCCURRENCE
That one person can do only so much and still do things well is true for
anyone after a point. Even the tasks and problems that flow naturally to
the supervisor can add up to a workload that is often too great for one person.
People differ greatly from each other in their capacity to take on additional
responsibilities. Some can absorb an astonishing number of tasks, but even
these people have their limits. And when individuals' limits are exceeded,
the stage is set for delegation failure if the process is not approached
reasonably and rationally.
Consequences of delegation failure
Delegation failure is a management shortcoming that leads to undesirable
consequences in a number of dimensions.
The nondelegating or improperly delegating supervisor is hurt by delegation
failure. This person will often suffer the results of work overload while
demonstrating to higher management that he or she cannot effectively delegate
and thus cannot control the job. Of course some supervisors are very good
at absorbing more and more and seeming to keep up, but eventually the work
days get longer and some tasks get attended to only superficially or perhaps
not at all.
The supervisor who covers many bases at high speed and puts in extra hours
as a matter of routine may briefly appear to be an energetic, highly productive
individual. Although occasional bursts of such activity are in order and
sometimes downright necessary, in the long run the supervisor who adopts
the workaholic pattern will impress nobody. Also, the workaholic supervisor
is compounding the risk of stress-related health problems.
If limited to effects on the supervisor, delegation failure might be easier
to accept in that its perpetrator would also be its sole victim. However,
most of the consequences of delegation failure accrue to the employees of
the nondelegating supervisor. The supervisor who fails to delegate properly
has denied the employees the opportunity to learn and grow. Minus this opportunity
the employees experience little or no challenge, and they are denied more
interesting work experiences and greater task variety.
Employees who do not have the chance to be challenged and to learn and grow
often become bored and generally demotivated. In this kind of environment
certain employees, primarily those who seek challenge and aspire to higher
positions, will decide to seek their futures elsewhere. Eventually the department
is left with mostly those who are not driven to seek advancement or interesting
experiences but are rather held by the nominal bonds of job security. It
is demonstrated time and again that the employees who are the first to leave
the stifling environment created by the nondelegating supervisor are those
employees who the organization should be most interested in retaining.
Delegation failure can also negatively affect a department's image. Once
acquired, a reputation for lack of timeliness, for lack of creativity, or
for unreliability can be extremely difficult to shed and can outlast the
reign of the nondelegating supervisor and make life difficult for the next
supervisor.
Why delegation failure?
There are a number of reasons for delegation failure. The most common among
these is a lack of time to delegate properly. Too often the supervisor takes
a short, narrow view of delegation and sees it primarily as a means of getting
some relief from part of the workload. The perceived need to delegate is
then experienced most acutely when the supervisor's time is in shortest supply.
Some give in and attempt to delegate to obtain some immediate relief.
Proper delegation, however, is a time-consuming process. Done correctly,
it requires more time and attention on the supervisor's part in the short
run. Delegation's potential time-saving payoff lies weeks or months in the
future. The time one puts into proper delegation today is at best an investment
in potential future gains. In brief, supervisors often feel the most pressure
to delegate at precisely the time when they are least prepared to delegate
properly.
Delegation will also fail if it is driven primarily by the supervisor's selfishness.
There has to be a sense of ownership developed in an employee who is expected
to take on a new task. If the employee cannot come up with a reasonable answer
to the reasonable question, "What's in it for me?," the truth of the matter
will quickly make itself felt: I'm doing this job only because the boss didn't
want to do it. Employee resistance or resentment kills the process when it
is perceived that the supervisor is simply "passing the buck" or handing
off the undesirable work.
A number of other causes of delegation failure may be found in the personality
and character of some supervisors. A supervisor who is insecure may fear
competition from subordinates or may be unwilling to share the credit that
goes along with a job well done. In most organizational settings such supervisors'
fears and uncertainties are unfounded. Indeed, in many instances exactly
the opposite of what the supervisor fears can be true. That is, the subordinate
who does an outstanding job with a delegated task can make the entire department--including
the supervisor--look good.
Old habits are frequently encountered reasons for failing to delegate properly
and fully. Most supervisors' earliest working years were devoted completely
to the doing of work. Some never get completely beyond that old mind-set
even though as supervisors they have spent years supposedly directing the
doing of work by others.
Another common reason for the failure to delegate is the feeling that available
employees simply cannot handle increased responsibility. A classic situation
presents itself: you hesitate to trust someone with more responsibility because
you do not know whether he or she can handle it, yet the only way you will
ever find out is to try. This uncertainty, and the attendant risk of failure,
causes many supervisor to hold back when they should be reaching out.
WHAT IS ACTUALLY DELEGATED
We have heard and read time and again about the delegation of responsibility.
However, in the strictest sense, every reference to delegated responsibility
is incorrect. Delegating actually means giving away something--specifically,
task performance authority--to someone else. If, for example, you delegate
your department's monthly activity report to a trusted employee, you have
given away that task in that you no longer perform it. But the responsibility
for that task remains yours. Should your trusted employee let you down and
either bungle the report or not do it at all, you remain responsible for
those results.
You can and should, of course, make an employee to whom you have delegated
responsible in turn to you. Then if the task is bungled or ignored, the employee
must answer to you, although you still must answer for the situation to your
manager. Therefore, when a task is delegated, it is authority that is delegated.
Task performance authority rests with only a single level, but task responsibility
is replicated at each level involved in the delegation.
The key to delegation, and thus to empowerment, is equivalent authority and
responsibility. That is, the person who is made responsible for performing
the task must be given sufficient authority to complete the task. When one
is fully responsible for a task without having full authority, we find that
the job gets done only when one begs or borrows resources or assistance outside
of normal channels. Indeed it is fairly common practice for an individual
who is made responsible for completing a given task to discover that it cannot
be done without the assistance of someone who reports to a different manager
but that no arrangement has been made for assistance.
Although responsibility without full authority can present difficulties,
it is usually possible to get the job done with imagination and creativity
if the disparity between responsibility and authority is not too great. In
fact, a small to modest amount of this imbalance can challenge and stimulate
some employees. However, if the disparity is large, the job becomes more
and more difficult and eventually impossible.
TASK AUTHORITY: WHAT CAN ACTUALLY BE DELEGATED
The supervisor's job is made up of managerial or supervisory tasks and technical
tasks. The latter can be delegated; the former cannot.
The supervisor cannot delegate, for example, decisions to hire, fire, promote,
demote, or to grant pay increases, and cannot delegate disciplinary actions
or performance evaluations. In brief, the supervisor cannot legitimately
delegate functions that can be described as personnel actions. It is possible
to obtain staff involvement in at least two of the aforementioned personnel
activities, however. Consider the supervisor who assigns a trusted, long-term
subordinate to do screening interviews of job candidates. The interviewer
may talk with six or seven applicants, for example, and pass along to the
supervisor the apparently strongest two or three possibilities. Concerning
performance evaluations, the supervisor may wish to obtain the input of other
staff as part of a peer-review process. But whether interviewing or evaluating,
it should remain clear that the actual decision on a potential hire or possible
evaluation score is the supervisor's alone.
It is also possible at times to delegate limited portions of departmental
planning, budgeting, and development of departmental policies and procedures.
Doing so reflects common sense management; the people who will live with
these plans, budgets, policies, and procedures should be able to participate
as much as practical in their development.
One can generally delegate everything that falls outside of personnel actions
and the other few exceptions cited above. That is, all of the supervisor's
nonsupervisory work can potentially be delegated.
BRINGING PERSON AND TASK TOGETHER
Giving a job that needs doing to the next employee who passes by is an invitation
to failure. Some effort must be expended in examining the nature of the task
relative to the qualifications and experience of the available people. Delegation
is a highly imperfect process. Whenever one brings together a task with a
person who has not previously performed it, there is a risk of failure. If
we absolutely knew every delegation would work perfectly, there would be
little chance of growth and challenge would be absent. Each task must be
realistically assessed for what it involves, and person and task must be
carefully matched.
Some common sense rules should apply in selecting someone to take on any
particular task. Specifically:
* Delegate a task only to someone who you feel can be trusted to give it
a fair shake in terms of attitude and effort. There is little point, for
example, in giving additional work to a person who has so far only impressed
you as a dodger of "extra" effort.
* Delegate only to someone you believe is ready to assume some authority
and perhaps grow a little. Avoid delegating, for example, to an employee
so new to your department that he or she has not yet demonstrated complete
grasp of the position's basic duties.
* Delegate only to people who report directly to you. If, for example, you
have two assistant supervisors and a secretary reporting to you but your
entire department includes 25 people, there are three people to whom you
can delegate work, not 25. Any delegating to the rank-and-file staff should
come from the assistant supervisors. Never bypass your subordinate supervisors
by delegating directly to their employees. Doing so only undermines your
own chain of command and reinforces with the rank-and-file that they can
bypass their supervisors and deal directly with you.
PREPARING THE PERSON
For each delegated task, the chosen employee needs certain information. Using
the radiology department's monthly activity report of the opening example,
Janet's possible directions to Allen are provided along with the general
descriptions of eight bits of information the employee should be given.
1. The complete definition of the task.
"If you agree and we can get together on a reasonable process, you're going
to be providing most of the statistical information for our monthly activity
report."
2. The results expected.
"I'd like you to assemble all of the statistical information that goes into
the report, once per month."
3. When the task starts.
"We'll begin with the September report, which gives you nearly four full
weeks to prepare."
4. The duration of the task.
"Consider the duration indefinite, since this is a monthly report and as
far as I know it will be required of us monthly for the foreseeable future."
5. How much time the task should take.
"Once you're completely familiar with how this is done, it should require
about two hours each month.
6. The procedure for performing the task.
"We've never had a written procedure for this, so the first couple of times
we can go through it together and we'll document the primary steps as we
go."
7. The motivational aspects of the task; "what's in it" for the employee.
"This should give you a little variety, a bit of a break from some of the
other things you do all the time. Also, this could help you prepare for the
possibility of one of the senior tech positions someday. After all, the senior
techs get more into administrative matters."
8. The authority assigned.
"You'll eventually be doing the whole report yourself, so you're free to
adjust your schedule on your customary data collection day, and you can sign
as preparer of the report and I'll sign off as department manager."
EXAMINING YOUR DELEGATION PERFORMANCE
Maintaining too much control over an employee can destroy the effects of
delegation. Why delegate if you will then monitor the employee's every move?
Conversely, too little control can be damaging in that a task can go far
off track. Employees differ greatly from each other. All tasks are not the
same in magnitude or difficulty. The combinations of employees and tasks
seem practically limitless, so the supervisor cannot regard every pairing
of person and delegated task in the same way. It is necessary to know the
employees well enough to have a sense of how closely any individual's activities
will have to be supervised.
There is also the danger of destroying the benefits of delegation by pulling
a task away from an employee at the first signs of shaky performance. We
should consider an apparently shaky performance as an early indication of
the possible need for additional instruction and supervisory support. Actually
pulling back an assignment should be the last resort, following all reasonable
efforts to get performance back on track.
We must also be aware of the need to delegate whole, definable tasks, not
just pieces. Employees to whom we delegate need to have a sense of accomplishing
something, hopefully completing something, and individual motivation will
usually be much stronger if they can see how tasks fit together and they
can point to the specific results of their efforts.
Be aware of the need to delegate "good stuff," not simply the boring or dirty
jobs that you clearly do not want to do. Proper motivation depends a great
deal on whether an employee is interested and challenged or is convinced
that this latest delegated task is simply the "scut work" the boss did not
want to do. The supervisor must be aware that some employees perceive an
extremely fine line dividing delegation from dumping.
The successfully delegating supervisor will go to some lengths to openly
acknowledge the employees' contributions. As some supervisors will shy away
from delegating because they fear losing credit to subordinates, so will
certain others who may delegate take credit for what is actually done by
the employees. Truly effective supervisors realize, however, that subordinates'
successful performance also represents supervisory success.
Probably the most important dimensions of a supervisor's delegation performance
reside in the extent to which the supervisor has provided the employee with
the freedom to fail. One of the surest ways to destroy delegation is to punish
a subordinate for making a mistake. However, people do not learn and grow
without making mistakes. Every mistake has to be treated as part of the growth
experience; no mistake should be allowed to inhibit further attempts to learn
and grow. Each employee should be prepared with all reasonable guidance and
assistance before tackling a delegated task, but if something goes wrong,
what follows should be constructive correction and support, not negative
repercussions.
EMPOWERMENT
There is probably no concept associated with the TQM that is as widely misunderstood
as empowerment. Empowerment is one of the truly "in" words of the decade
of the '90s, whether we are speaking of employees relative to their work,
parents relative to their children's education, residents relative to their
community, or others who could benefit from active input in determining their
own destiny.
Much of the misunderstanding of empowerment probably arises from two conditions.
First, empowerment is presented as though it is something new and different.
The ongoing "word game" that continually gives us new names for older, tarnished
concepts does not tell us that it is simply delegation done correctly, so
we are expecting something not previously encountered. Second, the root word
of empowerment--power--immediately raises the expectations of those who believe
empowerment to be something brand new. Some interpret this as power coming
into their hands, the automatic authority to address issues they could not
previously address and to make decisions in their own way.
Although empowerment and proper delegation are the same process, we cannot
deny their semantic differences. Even when one ignores the decades of tarnish
on delegation, the word "delegation" cannot stand up to "empowerment" in
connotation. On all counts empowerment is the "better" word, carrying the
far more favorable connotation. It is in all instances the preferred word,
but because of the difficulties noted above, it is frequently misunderstood.
At a fairly basic level, empowerment has initially been taken by some as
the authority to "do their own thing." In TQM education the essential customer
focus of all business--service to internal as well as external customers--frequently
takes some time to establish. The empowerment concept, however, is readily
taken up in its misunderstood form, and some employees slide right past the
issue of customer focus and fix on what they can personally obtain from TQM.
Thus we have the example of the hastily assembled employee team that went
to work on determining how to implement 12-hour shifts in their unit, not
because it was thought that a new scheduling pattern might enhance patient
care but rather because most of the unit's staff wanted for themselves a
schedule of three 12-hour shifts per week. Similarly, there was the individual
who expressed the belief that he was now free to alter his starting and quitting
times to better accommodate attendance at his second job.
The empowered employee must in fact have in common with the empowered manager
a strong customer focus, and it should be a given that customers, in their
own particular priority order, are the primary concern. If the empowered
employee is given a certain amount of decision-making authority, this must
consist of the authority to deliver certain expected results. The empowered
employee is self-directed, but only within the limits of the general direction
and expected results provided by the manager.
Thus we are able to return to the contention that empowerment and proper
delegation are one and the same. The manager provides instruction, assistance,
support, resources, expected results, and overall direction that may well
have been developed with the employee's participation, and the employee operates
freely within those boundaries to deliver what the customers need.
Not everyone wants to be empowered. Some people simply do not want their
jobs to get any larger, and we get nowhere with talk of increased job interest
and increased opportunity to learn and grow. As supervisors have discovered
frequently over the years, not every employee is a reasonable candidate for
delegation. Some employees want no more responsibility than they presently
have. Some wish only to put in their workdays and collect their pay, and
some will be sufficiently resistant to change that they see attempts to expand
or enrich their jobs as threatening.
The resistant employee is a supervisor's special challenge. It can be extremely
satisfying to turn around the attitude of someone who has been chronically
resistant to change and perhaps distrusting of management. This is not readily
accomplished. All employees are equally deserving of the supervisor's attention
and respect, but not all will respond to the supervisor in the desired manner.
It is expected in every TQM implementation that a proportion of employees
will never completely "buy in." There will be some who will not respond but
will rather continue to do their jobs as always. What is the supervisor to
do with such employees?
The answer, not always welcome, is to accept those particular employees for
what and where they are. When an employee resists delegation, the supervisor's
initial reaction should be to reassess the supervisor's own approach to ensure
that the delegation is honest and thorough, that it represents empowerment
in the finest sense of the word. If the delegation approach withstands rigorous
scrutiny and the employee continues to resist, the supervisor should move
on to another employee.
Eventually the employee who resists will be left to simply perform in the
same manner. As long as the resistant employee is performing at or above
the minimum standard of the job and will not respond to the encouragement
to do more and better, there is little the supervisor can do except focus
on other employees. The resistant employee will be passed over for delegated
assignments. By thus forfeiting the opportunity to learn and grow, this employee
will essentially be self-limited as far as promotional opportunity is concerned.
A SENSE OF OWNERSHIP
A large proportion of delegation's failures are due to motivational problems.
The process is too often treated as simply handing off work to a subordinate
for the sole purpose of getting it done. Little is done to instill a sense
of task ownership in the person to whom the work is delegated.
Task ownership arises when a willing employee who is asked to take on something
new is properly instructed, encouraged, and included in determining exactly
what needs to be done and planning how it should be done. Call it delegation
or call it empowerment, without a sense of ownership the employee's reaction
is still likely to be, "After all, it's her job, not mine."
Charles R. McConnell Vice President for Employee Services The Genesee Hospital
Rochester, New York
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or
distribution is prohibited without permission.
