When a leader says (out loud), ‘you’re empowered, you own this decision,’ but says (with their actions), ‘you’re empowered as long as you make the decision I would make,’ we call that empowerment theater.
Are you tired of talking about empowerment without seeing real results? In this episode, Peter and Richard dive into the common trap of “empowerment theater”—when leaders say the right things about autonomy but fail to back them up with meaningful action.
Discover the three essential elements of productive empowerment: clarity, capability, and systems. You’ll learn practical strategies for creating the conditions where teams can make better decisions, move faster, and deliver innovative solutions to your organization’s biggest challenges.
Whether you’re leading a team, managing stakeholders, or driving change in your organization, this episode will help you turn empowerment from a buzzword into a game-changing strategy.
Go Deeper
- Building Autonomy and Accountability through Delegation: For more on how to empower your team to excel at higher at higher levels of autonomy, fostering trust, accountability, and alignment, join us on Feb 26 for a 90-minute workshop. More info and register here.
- Humanizing Work’s Leadership Intensive: Effective leadership is at the heart of productive empowerment. To take your leadership to the next level, join the Feb cohort of our 8-week Leadership Intensive, starting Feb 27.
Episode transcription
Peter
Last fall, I was on a Zoom call with a new client, a C-level executive. After a quick intro, she paused and exhaled, clearly frustrated.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “Empowerment is one of my core values. I’ve spent 18 months trying to give my team more autonomy—communicating why it matters, encouraging managers to cascade the message. But the employee survey just came back, and the top complaint was: ‘Lack of autonomy. Too much micromanagement.’ What am I doing wrong?”
As we dug into the details, a pattern started to emerge. She had talked about empowerment, but her managers hadn’t lived it. Empowerment is much more than saying “you’re empowered,” and without real behavior change, the skepticism was high. Now when leaders talked about empowerment, employees were starting to roll their eyes.
Richard
We call that empowerment or delegation theater—when a leader says, out loud, “You’re empowered, you own this decision,” but then says with their actions, “You’re empowered as long as you make the decision I would make.”
It’s like giving someone a car but keeping the keys. They hear “you’re empowered,” but all they feel is frustration.
So in this episode, we’re going to share how to shift from empowerment theater to real, productive empowerment. The kind that leaves employees feeling motivated, making good delegated decisions, and contributing real creative, innovative solutions to the most pressing business needs.
Peter
Before we dive in, a quick reminder: The Humanizing Work Show is brought to you by the Humanizing Work company, where we help organizations transform leadership, product management, and collaboration. If you’re ready for better results, visit humanizingwork.com to schedule a conversation. And if you enjoy the show, don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share your thoughts in the comments!
Richard
In consulting with product development organizations, we often see this gap between intended empowerment and reality. I was working with a team recently where leadership kept saying “you own the backlog,” but every sprint planning the same exec would show up and completely reorder their priorities.
Peter
That’s another classic and all too common example of empowerment theater. There’s a big risk that over time, when this happens, it creates a learned helplessness where teams just stop even trying to make decisions because they know they’ll get overruled anyway.
Richard
Yeah, we’ve seen that more than once, and it’s hard to unwind once it’s in place. So the big question is, how do you break out of the empowerment theater trap?
Peter
Right, because most managers we work with see the benefits of greater empowerment. After all, if I empower someone to have autonomy over certain decisions, and the results are good, that’s one less thing I have to focus on as a manager. That’s productive empowerment, and that’s a win-win all around.
Richard
I like that term–productive empowerment. It’s the opposite of empowerment theater, which is unproductive and demotivating.
So, here’s how we’ve seen leaders create productive empowerment:
Empowerment rests on three critical pillars: clarity, capability, and systems. If any one of these three is missing, empowerment collapses.
When teams lack clarity, they don’t know what decisions they can make or what success looks like. When they lack capability, they don’t have the skills or information to make good decisions and execute effectively. And when systems are missing or misaligned, even the best clarity and capability won’t translate into real sustainable, productive empowerment.
I worked with an education software company that was struggling with product teams having to wait for their database team to approve and implement database changes for them. They were cross-functional except for the database capability. The exec in charge said, “I think most of our product teams actually have developers with database skills, so let’s empower them to make their own database changes with advice from the database team.” So, they tried that. And, at first, it failed badly.
Teams were supposedly empowered to make their own database changes, but every time they tried to actually make a change, the database team overrode it. I remember one team lead saying, “Why bother? They’re going to shoot it down anyway.” That frustration spread. Eventually, teams stopped trying and waited for permission instead.
When we dug in, it was obvious why things weren’t working.
No one had defined which decisions product teams could make independently vs which ones the database team still had authority over—a problem with clarity.
Teams did have database skills, but they weren’t aligned across the org about what good database development looked like and how to do it—a need for better capability.
And then there were a couple of broken systems. They were still using the old process for managing work flowing through the database team, which didn’t fit the new authority structure. And there was no common approach for resolving disagreements.
To help them fix this, we held a workshop with the database team and participants from product teams to create some clear guidelines about who could make which decisions. Then, we got some of the database team members to run workshops about database development patterns and why things had been implemented in certain ways in the system up to that point. And finally we helped them set up a lightweight review process where teams could get fast feedback on proposed database changes and we set up that process with a bias towards approving rather than blocking changes.
Peter
Oh, that’s nice. That’s a great example of addressing all three pillars. You created clarity with the guidelines, you increased capability through the internal training, and then established a system with the early feedback process.
Richard
And it worked. Teams started making more decisions independently, and when they did need to involve the database teams, the conversations were more productive. The funny thing was that over time, product teams actually made better decisions than when they were trying to control everything centrally—they had a better understanding of the product changes that the database changes were helping to create.
Peter
I’ve seen that pattern too. When you support empowerment properly, teams often make better decisions than when everything had to go through central control. They have more context about their specific situation, and they can move faster. And this isn’t just about technical decisions. We use these three pillars—clarity, capability, and systems—when helping organizations with product decisions, process decisions, really any area where you want teams to be empowered.
Richard
Right. Last month, I worked with a product team struggling with stakeholder relationships. Leadership kept saying to product owners, “You own your product strategy,” but they felt paralyzed. One told me, “Every time I prioritize one stakeholder’s request, another one is furious. I don’t know how to win here” When we looked at those three pillars, the problem was obvious. They had the capability—they knew their market, they knew the customer, and they knew the technology, But they lacked clarity on how to handle stakeholder conflicts, and they didn’t have a system to manage competing demands.
Peter
So what did you end up doing there?
Richard
We helped them create a stakeholder interaction map—basically clarity about which stakeholders needed to be consulted for which types of decisions and how frequently. They ended up scheduling a few regular stakeholder review sessions where product leaders could share their thinking and get input early, before decisions were locked in.
Peter
And I bet that changed the relationship with stakeholders quite a bit.
Richard
It did. Instead of stakeholders feeling like they had to fight for their priorities, they understood the process and trusted that they’d be heard at the right time.
Peter
If you’re seeing these patterns in your organization, take a closer look at those three pillars of empowerment. Does your team have the clarity they need to make the decisions? Do they have the capability to deliver? And are your systems supporting them—or holding them back? When you build those foundations, empowerment stops being a buzzword –we don’t have empowerment theater–and it starts delivering real results: productive empowerment.
Richard
And something we haven’t mentioned yet: but if you’re familiar with our work, you probably caught it. These three pillars—clarity, capability, and systems—form the foundation of the Humanizing Work 3 Jobs of Management model. This model is designed to help leaders and managers create environments where teams thrive. By focusing on clarity, capability, and systems, you’re not just empowering teams; you’re fulfilling the key responsibilities of management in a human-centered way.
Peter
Right, and this model is at the core of how we work with organizations. We offer regular public and private workshops to teach the 3 Jobs of Management in depth and explore how to improve all three. And if you’d like some help diving deeper on those ideas, visit humanizingwork.com to learn more.
Richard
Empowerment isn’t, in essence, about removing constraints, though you might do that. It’s really about creating the conditions for great decisions. When you do that, the results can be incredible.
Last updated