Don't Empower Your Employees, Stop Disempowering Them

One of the common questions I have been asked in the past is, how do we empower our employees. For me the answer has always been about investing in employee experience. But lately I have been thinking about the root cause of this problem. Why do we need to empower our people in the first place? If you think about an employee's first day at work, they are already engaged, excited, they want to be there. They are already empowered. The problem lies with us as leaders. We actually disempower our employees, not on purpose, but over time it happens. We bog our employees down with rules, regulations, policies, hierarchy, bureaucracy and other outdated workplace practices. And then once we bog them down and strip them of their power we ask, "how do we empower our employees?". Instead of empowering them, we need to figure out how to not disempower them to begin with.