1. Overview

According to Gallup Research, organizations utilize less than 20% of their employee’s potential. To develop employee potential requires an organizational culture that inspires employees to learn, grow and give their very best. In such a culture innovations which require new employee behaviors be adopted can take root. Employees choose to go the extra mile expending their discretionary energy for the sake of the organization. Employees choose to invest themselves in the organization rather than be available to the highest bidder. For most organizations developing this untapped employee potential is their key competitive advantage for competing in the marketplace or retaining top talent.

An analogy to help understand whether an organizational culture supports learning, growing and the adoption of new behaviors is a garden. Will new seeds/ behaviors take root because the soil/culture is fertile or will they die or wither on the vine due to unfertile soil? Many change interventions wrongly assume that an organization’s learning and growing capacity is inherent, and all that is needed is to train the employees and they will adopt the new behaviors. Any one who has managed a large scale organizational change process will attest that it is hard to change engrained behaviors and more efforts fail than succeed.

An empowering organization audit enables an organization to learn about the current capacity of its employee’s to adopt new behaviors. It evaluates the organizational culture on six values critical to empowering employees to learn and grow. The outcome of this assessment determines the current fertility of the cultural soil for adoption of new behaviors. With this knowledge the organization can make informed culture change adjustments.

Symptoms of a disempowering organizational culture often include:

• Blaming and victim mentality

• Fear of making decisions

• Lack of participation in decision making

• New ideas not taken seriously

• Leaders versus employees mindset

• Distrust and cynicism

• Apathy and burnout

• Thoughts or feelings not freely expressed for fear of repercussion

• Learning and growth opportunities not being actively pursued

• Gossip and back biting poisoning work environment

• People feel unappreciated

• Lack of recognition for contributions

• Top talent leaving for better opportunities or work environment

The following six values with corresponding practices are imbedded in an organizational culture developing the full potential of its employees.

1. Self Responsibility: Individuals take responsibility to have their job, team, function, organization, the way they wish it to be. This is the counterpoint to being a victim within the organization.

2. Authentic Communication: Individual communication is open, honest, transparent, and vulnerable. Individuals are talking about the real issues going on in the organization.

3. Trust: Individuals feel safe enough to try out new behaviors and take risks without fear of reprimand or put down by their superiors or colleagues if they make mistakes. There is a genuine sense of good will that pervades the organization.

4. Personal and Group Process Skills: Individuals and the organization have established protocols and developed skills which are regularly deployed to resolve interpersonal issues that come up in project management. Issues are resolved quickly and cleanly.

5. Learning and Growing: Individuals are encouraged and rewarded to work on the real growth issues necessary for professional and personal development within the framework of the organization. Individuals are ever challenging themselves and supporting each other to develop and grow.

6. Caring: The organizational leadership demonstrate in tangible ways concern for individual employee well being. Employees feel valued and are inspired to give their very best effort on behalf of the organization.

2. Empowering Organization Audit

This audit provides a base line for developing a culture change intervention to enable learning, growing and the development of full employee potential. Employees evaluate their group or department and organization as a whole based on the six values described above. Each is rated on a scale of 1-10 with 1 being seldom and 10 being consistently.

1. Self Responsibility ________.

2. Authentic Communication ________.

3. Trust ________.

4. Learning and Growing ________.

5. Personal and Group Process Skills ________.

6. Caring ________.

3. Large System Transformation Strategy

Creating an organizational culture fertile for learning and growing is the first step. The next, is determining the new seeds/behaviors that need to be planted and building the organizational capacity to cultivate these behaviors over time. It has four stages.

Stage 1: Determine behaviors with corresponding practices to be adopted by the organization.

Stage 2: Design culture/behavior change program and accountability system.

Stage 3: Build capacity of organization to implement behavior change program either internally or externally.

Stage 4: Design and implement program diffusion strategy, evaluate and adjust as needed.

6. Excerpts from The Experience Economy

These excerpts provide the value proposition for Empowerment Institute's transformational work within organizations.

By Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore, Harvard Business School Press

“…a struggling company wants something beyond informational goods, advisory services or educational experiences: it wants to grow. Companies clearly value an offering of economic growth more highly than they do the goods and services or even the isolated experiences, that still form much of the basis of the consulting industry…. As economic activity shifts further and further away from goods and services, those companies which stage experiences alone – without considering the effect these experiences will have on participants and without designing the experiences in such a way as to create the desired change – will eventually see their experiences become commoditized.”

“Transformations are a distinct economic offering, the fifth and final one in our progression of value. (Prior economic offerings are extract commodities, manufactured goods, services and experiences.) While commodities are fungible, goods tangible, services intangible, experiences memorable, transformations are effectual. All other economic offerings have no lasting value beyond their consumption. Even memories of an experience fad over time. But buyers of transformation seek to be guided toward some specific aim or purpose, and transformations must elicit that intended effect. Such buyers aspire to something different. Without a change in attitude, performance, characteristics, or some other fundamental dimension no transformation occurs. And this change should be not just in degree but kind, not just in function but in structure. The transformation effects the very being of the buyer.”

“While companies store commodities in bulk, inventory goods after production, deliver services on demand, and reveal experiences over a duration of time, they must sustain transformation through time if they are to take hold, to genuinely change the aspirant. Finally, whereas commodities are natural, goods standardized, services customized, and experiences inherently personal, transformations are individual. The offering does not exist outside the changed traits each aspirant desires; it is that change itself. …People value transformations above all other economic offerings because it addresses the ultimate source of all other needs: why the buyer desires the commodities, goods, services and experiences he or she purchases.”

“Indeed with transformations, the economic offering of the company is the individual person or company changed as a result of what the consultant does. With transformations, the customer is the product. Once the Experience Economy has run its course, the Transformation Economy will take over. Then the basis of success will be in understanding the aspirations of the individual consumers and businesses and guiding them to fully realize their aspirations.”

“Transformation elicitors find follow-through the most difficult phase, and it is the one at which many fall short. Management consultants who deliver strategic analysis without guiding the client through implementation of the recommended changes remain in the service business; they are not in the transformation business. Educators who impart knowledge without ensuring that students can apply what they learned ascend to the experience business (at best)!”

“Transformation elicitors are greatly increasing their share of the total economic pie. Today the only thing better than being in the business of staging experiences is being in the business of eliciting transformations. Both represent not only viable sectors of the economy but the very engines of growth that will create more than enough jobs and outputs to supplant slowdowns in the lower-echelon sectors…. Nothing is more important, more abiding, or more wealth creating than the wisdom required to transform customers. And nothing will command as high a price.”

7. Feedback on The Empowering Organization Methodology

A recent application of the empowering organization methodology is described in this letter by an executive from American Express.

“A key challenge in institutions is how to move individuals to higher levels of performance, specifically when it involves building partnerships within complex organizational systems. This truly requires an empowering transformative strategy.

For me at American Express, David Gershon proved he is truly a visionary in these matters. He helped my team – whose mission it is to build and improve talent within the company – through an intense, personalized learning experience using his unique transformational learning approach.

Our team had been working under circumstances that in many ways prevented their ability to achieve our mission – there were barriers such as lack of access to critical information or key partners, limited experience creating results in a highly politicized environment and extremely poor relationships within the Human Resources organization that itself was seeking to find a value proposition.

David and the highly effective set of tools of his Empowerment Institute helped produce significant, measurable and sustainable behavior change within our team. He helped us separate the circumstance around us that is charged with a disempowering "pathology," and helped us focus on our own personal accountability: what we can accomplish and what we are ultimately capable of attaining. After a deep assessment of our organizational culture and challenges, he built our consulting skills and worked us through short and long term implementation plans – helping us build strategies to leverage our collective talent and create business results.

The results of David's work were a clearly defined value proposition and an ability to be successful despite any organizational barriers. He moved us away from the crippling power of "problems" to a new power – one inside us, one focused on what we want to create. Through David's work, this team now has daily practices focusing on their vision. We are empowered!”

– Bob Franco, Vice President – Global Talent Division
American Express Company

8. Participant Feedback on Empowering Organization Training

“As we continue to look for ways of building a truly committed, energized workforce, I have found the empowering organization training to be extremely helpful.”

– Deborah Barber, VP Human Resources, Cray Research

“I highly recommend this training program. It offered us a new sense of power and commitment to carry empowerment into our organization.”

– Nancy Cosgroff, VP and Director, Norwest University, Norwest Corporation

“A workshop with David Gershon in a unique experience. He does not hand out knowledge but creates the conditions for participants to discover their own truths. The results is learning and commitment to action.”

– Ellen Farrar, Senior VP Human Resources, UNUM Corporation

“David Gershon gets to the core of how real organizational change happens.”

– Sue Inches, Principal, Strategic Directions Consulting

For more information about the organizational behavior and culture change consulting and training services please contact:

David Gershon
Empowerment Institute
PO Box 428
Woodstock, NY 12498
(845) 246-6290 Fax: (845) 246-6291