The essence of team management is empowerment rather than control or motivation

What is the difference between management and empowerment?

What is the difference between control and empowerment? For example:

Management theory emphasizes that a person's management radius cannot exceed seven people, which means that the number of direct reports cannot exceed seven people. But at Google, the number of direct reports is often more than 20 or even 30 or 40. Why is there such an arrangement? The logic behind it is empowerment. Leaders provide knowledge support to subordinates and integrate various resources, which can help subordinates achieve greater results. The purpose is not management. Managers can completely ignore the management boundary. This breaks the management radius and forces them to adapt to a new way of operating.

The Internet era is an era of creative revolution. The main driving force of creators is the sense of accomplishment and social value brought by creation, and self-motivation is their characteristic. This is fundamentally different from traditional manual workers and even general knowledge workers. What they need most is not motivation, but empowerment, which means providing them with a more efficient environment and tools.

The most important function of future organizations is to increase the probability of creative success, and empowerment is the only way to achieve this goal.

Management organizations usually have the following characteristics: the set rules and regulations are relatively strict, and employees must implement them seriously; the team's organizational structure is pyramidal, and the implementation of a decision needs to be handed down from level to level; Managers like to control their subordinates. If their subordinates are disobedient, they will be dissatisfied and may even feel that employees have violated their authority. They formulate strict performance appraisal indicators and use the appraisal results to judge employees' work abilities. In such an organizational model, employees will not only feel stressed, but they will also be unable to exert their autonomy, find it difficult to exert their creativity, and their enthusiasm will be frustrated.

The opposite is true for enabling organizations. Although this management model also formulates various rules and regulations and requires the use of basic management methods, it places more emphasis on empowering employees. For example, after employees complete their work efficiently, they can share related benefits; if they perform well, they will be rewarded, and if they perform poorly, they will be punished. Here, employees' creative consciousness will be stimulated, and employees prefer to engage in more challenging work; in a relaxed working environment, employees can gain a strong sense of accomplishment and honor.

In the era of the rise of individuals, only by giving full play to individual value can we bring more performance to the enterprise. Although managerial organizations are suitable for labor-intensive enterprises with large numbers of employees, it does not mean that enterprises with many employees must adopt managerial organizations. Many companies have tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of employees, but they are not labor-intensive industries, but high-tech companies that require innovation. The work of employees needs to solve "face-to-face" problems, so it is necessary to integrate huge organizations The structure is divided into the smallest possible units so that the best people can work together to solve problems as much as possible.

In the traditional organizational structure, teams are divided according to the same job positions. Employees in the same team have basically similar positions, skills, etc. In the new organizational structure, the best people with different positions and skills are brought together, and they need to work together to solve the most difficult tasks. Therefore, the future trend is for outstanding talents to gather together.

Many companies regard innovation as their future development goal. No matter what the occasion, they emphasize the role of innovation in corporate development and require all teams to make innovation a work requirement. However, relying only on this indoctrination type propaganda has little effect. If the organizational structure does not support this requirement for innovation, it will not be possible for the enterprise to form an innovative atmosphere.

What is the difference between motivation and empowerment?

Empowerment is the most important organizational function in the new era. The great era based on artificial intelligence is coming. Those who cannot be surpassed by machines and artificial intelligence in the future will be the most valuable people in society. They take creativity, insight and customer perception as their core characteristics, and the sense of accomplishment and social value brought by creation as their biggest driving force. What they need most is not motivation, but empowerment.

The so-called empowerment is to provide employees with the environment and tools to create more efficiently. To put it bluntly, you can’t do it originally, but the organizational platform allows you to do it. Once an organization that empowers its employees is established, it will inevitably begin a tenacious journey of life growth. From this perspective, Google's rapid growth is easy to understand.

However, in the same era, there are huge differences in the management philosophies of different companies. Many domestic companies still continue to "treat people as machines." When a few outstanding companies begin to mention that "talent is a strategic resource for corporate development," leading companies such as Google have already regarded empowerment as the biggest function of organizational management.

There are no successful companies, only companies of the times. A large number of outstanding companies have also proven with facts: empowerment is not limited to leading Internet companies. Although some companies have not broken away from traditional industries, what armed them is no longer the pyramid management of the past, but the opposite of the inverted pyramid management. In this way, it not only highlights the flexibility of distributed management, but also strengthens the support of centralized management, allowing the enterprise to be reborn and fully embodying the word "empowerment".

The difference between empowerment and motivation is mainly reflected in the following aspects:

1. Incentives focus on benefit sharing, while empowerment emphasizes interest

Only those who come from the heart Only ambition can inspire continuous creation. Orders do not apply to employees. The function of the organization is no longer to assign tasks and supervise work, but to better match employees' expertise with customer problems, which requires more employee autonomy, higher mobility and A more flexible organization. It can even be said that it is the employees who use the organization's corporate services, rather than the company hiring the employees, and the relationship between the two has changed a lot.

The reason why many engineers from well-known companies such as Google and Microsoft are willing to join Xiaomi at relatively low wages and endure the "996" (go to work at 9 a.m., get off work at 9 p.m., work six days a week) The most important reason is that at Xiaomi, they can truly feel that they are creating new products and changing the world. Relying on this kind of self-motivation and self-drive, Xiaomi has taken the initiative to meet challenges and created many miracles in its several years of development.

2. Empowerment relies more on culture than motivation.

Only culture can bring like-minded people together. The cultural atmosphere of an organization itself is a reward, empowering people in the organization. You can create together with like-minded people.

The core function of an organization is the creation of culture and values. In an empowering organization, in order to fit the culture of the organization, managers must be willing to give and think proactively to create a culture that is consistent with employees' values ??and sense of mission, attracting employees' attention and forging ahead.

Facts have proved that the most cutting-edge innovative companies are usually characterized by distinctive cultures and values, such as: Google’s respect for top talents and its culture of not doing evil, Facebook’s geek culture and its desire to connect the world Their sentiments have made them favored by the best talents in the world.

In the industrial age, companies pursued the same mission, vision and values; in the new era, like-mindedness has become the basic requirement for employees for an empowering organization. If we want to gather top talents, we must have the courage to change the world and not forget our original intention of promoting the progress of human society.

3. Incentives focus on individuals, and empowerment emphasizes design and interaction

With the development of the Internet, the relationships between people within organizations have become closer. Many emerging disciplines have pointed out that the design of interaction mechanisms between people may be far more effective for organizations than for motivating individuals.

Creation is inherently difficult to plan and can only provide employees with resources and environments that they would not have access to individually. The most important thing is that only when employees fully interact with each other and have more opportunities for spontaneous collisions can greater value be created.

The most classic case is the breakthrough of Google AdWords advertising system: when five employees were playing billiards, they saw that the founder was dissatisfied with the quality of the company's advertising. So, they spent a weekend building the AdWords advertising system algorithm. What’s even more interesting is that none of these five people are from the advertising department, but they just have a series of supporting mechanism designs behind them. Google's weekly employee meetings can disclose to employees the company's ongoing projects. Employees have a high degree of autonomy and can mobilize resources across departments.

This well illustrates that the design of mechanisms to promote collaboration is the most important area of ??future organizational innovation.

Empowerment, the secret to building a super team

How to build a super team? The specific methods are as follows:

1. Build strategic and operational capabilities

The importance of grassroots teams within the organization depends on their level of strategic and operational capabilities. Strategic strength means that the team must understand where the users are, what user profiles and scenarios are, and use the leader's logic to allocate strategic resources; operating strength means that the team must look at profits and cash flow from a business perspective.

The finance department of a company once did one thing: analyzing every money earned by each management team in the company, what processes were used to earn it within the company, and which departments were involved. Finally, the Finance Department drew a critical path to gain profits—when HR distributes bonuses, those on the critical path will receive high bonuses. At the same time, back-end functional departments, such as the legal department, finance department, and human resources department, are also given a score to determine which departments are most helpful to employees when they help the company make money. After that, the bonuses of the functional departments will be judged based on specific evaluations.

The enterprise of the future is a network-like, individual-rising, constantly evolving biological organization. In this organization, every nerve ending is a brain. Enterprises must be like ecological organizations, ensuring the coexistence of multiple brains, promoting the company's collaborative development, and turning grassroots teams from nerve endings into smart brains that complement the headquarters.

2. Building Creativity

If the grassroots team wants to become a high-dimensional model, the most important thing is to improve creativity and change from obedience mode to creative mode. What is creativity? It is built using one's own thinking ability, without asking for more resources from the company, and can still evolve from low-dimensional to high-dimensional, allowing grassroots teams to find lower-cost and faster ways to solve problems. For example, JD.com uses this method to promote innovation among small teams.

Many pages on JD.com are handled by the production and sales department. A 20-minute regular team meeting is held every morning, allowing individuals to report on the exploitable headlines they saw yesterday. JD.com has assigned graphic designers to each small procurement and sales team. The team leader decides on the theme and asks the graphic designer to create a promotional page. After completing the page, the team leader reports internally. The logic of internal reporting is called the ABC principle: You It's C. If he wants to push things forward, he has to report to B. He can do it after agreeing to it. At the same time, he has to send a copy to A, but A doesn't have to give any response to C. When something goes wrong, ABC and *** share the responsibility, reducing C’s pressure.

Using this approach, no matter how big the organization is, things can be done quickly. Therefore, I would come up with innovative ideas in the morning, finish the drawings in the morning, and the page would be up at one or two o'clock in the afternoon. JD.com adjusts its own rhythm every day. This adjustment requires grassroots teams to have high-dimensional work skills and master methods to do their jobs quickly.

3. Dare to express immature ideas

Grassroots teams must dare to express immature ideas. This is an important factor in distinguishing whether the company is dynamic. If you cautiously express the same views as the leader within the company, the organization will lack vitality and cannot go very far. Only if there are more voices such as "I'm sorry, boss, interrupt you, I suddenly have an idea", company leaders will use curious and exploratory thinking to incorporate the ideas of grassroots employees, and then carry out innovation.

4. Memory, thinking and imagination

The brain has three major functions:

(1) Memory. The biggest problem with Chinese education is that it places too much emphasis on training children’s memory abilities. In fact, as long as you put the things you need to remember in your notebook, mobile phone, or Baidu, your brain can be completely cleared.

(2) Thinking. In the brain, a higher ability than memory is thinking. Harvard Business School’s case courses mainly train managers’ critical thinking. However, with the emergence of artificial intelligence, thinking ability is no longer the main human ability.

(3) Imagination. There is a very important space for cognitive upgrading, called imagination. Many people acquire new abilities not by doing it themselves, but by reading books, training, and listening to micro-lectures. They have rich imaginations in their minds and regard indirect experience as direct experience, which enriches their personal life experience. Brain cognitive upgrade is a very important empowerment.

Six questions on building an empowered team

Leaders hope that employees can be voluntary and self-motivated, that assigned tasks can be delivered on schedule, and that ideas can be implemented... However, in reality, often But it's a different story. Leaders follow employees and ask: when can it be delivered, what is the progress, and whether the cost is within the budget... Many times, the leader may not even get the answer he wants, which makes the leader feel depressed and helpless. Where does the problem occur? Is it employee slackness or lack of leadership skills?

In fact, most employees hope to achieve a career. The reason why their performance is unsatisfactory is largely due to the failure of their superiors to empower them. Only by empowering the team can we build a team that can fight and win.

1. Characteristics of empowered teams

In summary, empowered teams have the following characteristics:

1. autonomy. Empowered teams are all autonomous. Not only do they have things they want to do, but they can also do them voluntarily.

2. A sense of accomplishment. Team employees do what they want to do and are able to do what they want to do well, and have a full sense of accomplishment.

3. sense of meaning. Team employees believe that what they do is very valuable, which will stimulate intrinsic motivation and ensure a positive cycle of work.

4. Self-confidence. Team employees have a sense of accomplishment and their leaders provide positive support, making it easier for them to increase their confidence in themselves.

5. Sense of purpose. The team members have the same goals, and everyone works together to minimize all kinds of friction and resistance.

6. possibility. Employees have autonomy and not only follow orders from leaders, but also find more possibilities and even achieve goals beyond expectations.

2. Prerequisites for empowering the team

There is a prerequisite for empowering the team, which is that team members must have the same goals. If the goals between team leaders and employees are inconsistent, the so-called empowerment will ultimately create a team of reckless heroes. Usually, common goals can be divided into four aspects:

1. performance. This is the most visible outcome for an organization. For any organization, without performance, it loses its reason for existence.

2. growing up. Only when employees grow can they achieve higher performance goals in the future, and at the same time can employees gain value in the future human capital market.

3. cooperation. Collaboration will affect the efficiency between teams. If everyone works in the same direction, it will be easier to achieve twice the result with half the effort; if collaboration among employees is not smooth, everyone will not only be physically tired, but also mentally tired.

4. inheritance. Heritage is the most fundamental driving factor for the team. When people talk about the spirit of women's volleyball team, people usually think of the word "fighting", but the team spirit is not very recognizable. This is the power of inheritance.

3. Six questions for building an empowered team

The most fundamental thing about empowerment is to give full play to employees’ thinking ability and let them think. The most effective thing is to ask questions to employees and inspire them. them.

The six questions of empowering questions are shown in Table 2:

Table 2 The six questions of empowering questions

Pass the above questions , it can help employees clarify their current work ideas and the driving force for future work.

These six issues can be divided into two levels: execution layer and motivation layer. The first three questions are the execution layer, and the last three questions are the motivation layer. The executive level is the issue that leaders often pay attention to, and the motivation level is the issue that stimulates employees' sense of responsibility and drive. Leaders need to make the transition from focusing on execution to motivation.

How to "empower" your team?

How to empower project teams?

Xiao Li is a human resources manager in a chain industry. Previously, the company mainly faced end customers directly and had good sales performance. However, now the company's business has expanded and many agents have been recruited. When empowering franchisees, he encountered a problem: many franchisees were not transferred from their peers, but chose to be franchise agents because they thought the brand and market prospects were good.

However, after joining, the agent's business development requires the support of the headquarters, and such sales skills often do not lie in the personal abilities of the sales staff, but involve more professional skills. For example, when customers put forward their own requirements for color, some materials cannot be selected and the process will be limited, otherwise the product quality will be affected.

It takes almost half a year for a non-professional to learn these professional skills, and it is obviously unrealistic for dealers to wait half a year to start business, so the headquarters gave a strategy: let agents divide Modules learn professional skills to complete sales work as a team. This idea is indeed good, but there are problems with the overall cooperation of the team: how to ensure that the overall project team has a unified level?

This involves the issue of team empowerment. So, how to "empower" enterprises? After reading the following example about Tencent, you may know the answer.

1. Technology empowerment. In terms of technology empowerment, Tencent provides partners with information technology services such as data, security, and LBS, with a focus on sharing cloudification. Tencent is supported by AI + big data + Tencent Cloud, and connects online centralized traffic portals and offline distributed brand data through the membership system. Enterprises can develop their own retail solutions based on Tencent systems to achieve maximum success. . For example, with mini programs, companies can associate mini programs with official accounts and embed them in articles, menu bars, etc. In addition to these channels, customers can also find your mini programs through nearby mini programs and search windows.

2. Marketing empowerment. Today, traditional industries are facing this question: Is it necessary to use technology to solve the industry’s marketing pain points? Maoyan’s theater co-branded card is a typical example of marketing empowerment. In order to meet the needs of marketing, Maoyan and Cinema jointly launched a theater co-branded card. Maoyan has cooperated with more than 7,000 cinemas and launched cinema co-branded cards. The number of users who have signed up the cards has exceeded 12 million, helping cinemas to carry out membership operations and enhance user stickiness. Through data empowerment and marketing empowerment, Maoyan has formed an industry unity with theaters, film studios and distributors in the film industry chain, and is in line with Tencent's two and a half strategy of "connection + content + 0.5 finance".

Of course, before "empowering" an enterprise, we must first sort out the core advantages and capabilities of the enterprise, and formulate the direction and benchmark for enterprise transformation and upgrading. Only in this way can we "empower" better, otherwise we will suffer from indigestion. , and suffer the consequences.

Empowerment is the only correct way to develop talents in this era. There are two important elements for success, one is ability and the other is passion. The key to team success is to empower as many high-performing talents as possible with both ability and passion.

Generally speaking, team empowerment includes the following points:

1. Atmosphere empowerment

Atmosphere is not one or two team-building activities, nor is it A slogan posted on the wall is a guideline rooted in the hearts of team members. In this era of increasingly like-minded people, companies rely more on culture than ever before. Only a consistent cultural atmosphere can bring like-minded people together.

Atmosphere is a set of explicit or implicit behavioral rules formed by the company in the long-term development. It affects the value judgment of team employees, affects the sense of existence of team employees, and even determines to a certain extent The final direction of the team. In a good atmosphere, employees will be passionate about doing a job.

For talents, it is a very lucky thing to be able to work in a cultural atmosphere that they like. There are only a few people with both high IQ and EQ, and there are only so many good times in life. Don’t let the bad atmosphere wipe out the passion and energy of the old employees.

Relying on individual breakthroughs will only waste valuable time and reduce the company's probability of success. Creating a good cultural atmosphere is the only choice to systematically improve the probability of success. Don't always say "culture is weak", it's because the culture you insist on is not valuable and attractive enough.

2. Authorization and empowerment

Authorization literally means "granting power." It's easy to understand literally, but not easy to do. Managers must distribute the power in their hands, share power with employees, assume responsibilities, and mobilize resources. This not only requires managers to have a broad enough mind, but also requires managers to be good at delegation.

Authorization is not about throwing things out and leaving them alone, but paying more attention to the results and handing over the process to those who are more directly involved.

Authorization means more complete control of details and more direct judgment and thinking.

Authorization is actually a kind of deliberate ability training.

People who are not authorized are generally submissive. After a long time, they think they have developed many skills, but in fact they are just little tricks to observe people's emotions.

People who are not authorized will never grow quickly and will always be just an obedient follower.

Organizational leaders facing the future must not only have the mind to delegate, but also have the ability to delegate accurately. Pay attention to results and process, achieve precise authorization, and maintain good order.

3. Achievement Empowerment

Success comes from self-confidence, and only when you succeed can you become more confident. People who have never succeeded cannot truly grow. The fastest way to improve an employee's abilities is to make him a successful person and equip him with the thinking patterns and behavior habits of successful people.

Continuously empowering employees through small achievements is the fastest way to grow employees. The growth of an employee is not just about how much he has experienced, but also how much he has truly succeeded.

The traditional model is that to use a person, you must not only carefully judge whether the person has the conditions, but also constantly test whether the person can do it. The empowerment model is to use a person, not only to consider the necessary conditions at the beginning, but also to mobilize various resources as much as possible in the process to help him do his best to achieve this thing.

Achievement empowerment is the only way to achieve rapid improvement in employee capabilities.