The Empowered Manager, 2nd Edition

FourThe Empowerment Choice

Empowerment is about the distribution of power, and power is a function of position in the hierarchy, a culture of choice at lower levels, and even more importantly, a state of mind. The conventional wisdom is that if you want to change a way of doing business, you either have to be at the top or have angels at the top. There is no question that if the top executives support your efforts, life is easier than if they don't. But the power of position is overrated. We frequently find people near or at the top feeling as powerless as people at the middle or the bottom. We are reluctant to believe this because of our deep wish for our leaders to be powerful. Wishing for strong leadership doesn't make it so. Those at the top feel as caught in the middle as the rest of us.

I discovered this discouraging reality years ago working with First National Stores, a supermarket chain in the Northeast. First National, called Finast, was a dominant food chain in the 1940s and 1950s, but in the early 1960s, it was slow to react to competition from smaller chains with stores twice the size and with twice the weekly sales volume. A Finast store was averaging $40,000 in sales a week, while the newer chains were averaging $100,000 a week, with some stores reaching an amazing $250,000 a week. They did this with larger stores, cut-rate prices, low service and labor cost, and aggressive neighborhood merchandising.

Finast woke up to the dilemma in the early 1960s and decided ...