Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

As for empowerment, I simply hate that word. The idea is well intentioned, but the truth is that there is so much concern about empowering people only because the prevailing way of managing them takes their power away.

explicitly set the standard with their teams that it was unacceptable to talk about people behind their backs or to come to them to complain about a colleague, unless, of course, the problem was one concerning ethical violations,

what people most want from work: to be able to come in and work with the right team of people— colleagues they trust and admire—and to focus like crazy on doing a great job together.

Here is my radical proposition: a business leader’s job is to create great teams that do amazing work on time. That’s it. That’s the job of management.

People need to see the view from the C suite in order to feel truly connected to the problem solving that must be done at all levels and on all teams, so that the company is spotting issues and opportunities in every corner of the business and effectively acting on them. The irony is that companies have invested so much in training programs of all

A company’s job isn’t to empower people; it’s to remind people that they walk in the door with power and to create the conditions for them to exercise it. Do that, and you will be astonished by the great work they will do for you.

I think it’s totally false that we have to treat them differently. I can’t stand the term “millennials,” and the ones I know hate the name tag too. We should simply think of them as people early in their careers. Yes, we should teach them more, but we should teach them more about how business works.

If you don’t tell them about how the business is doing, what your strategy is, the challenges you’re facing, and what market analysts think of how you’re doing, then they will get that information elsewhere—

When I talked with my former VP of HR Jessica Neal about this, she said a great thing about what a company’s culture should be: “Culture is the strategy of how you work. And if people believe it is a strategy and that it is important, they will help you think about it deeply and try things.”