The Empowered Manager, 2nd Edition

FiveCreating a Vision of Greatness

Empowering ourselves comes from acting on our enlightened self-interest. Empowerment is inviting people at every level to follow this way of being. We define what our unit has to offer the organization that will truly make a difference. We want to build an organization that expresses all of our values about work, achievement, and community. Therefore, the first step in implementing an entrepreneurial organization is to create a vision of greatness for our group. This vision expresses our values and what we hope to contribute.

Claiming Our Autonomy by Creating a Vision

Autonomy is the decision we make to act on our own choice. Interdependence is the recognition that we cannot create anything alone. The most fundamental choice we make is to create a future of our own choosing. In some ways, the future is the cause of our current behavior.^* We have a vision or an image of where we wish to head and the kind of organization we wish to create, and we act in ways that we believe are in pursuit of creating that future. The alternative is to act on a future of someone else's creation. We ask the organization to tell us its vision, its values, and how it wants us to operate, and then that becomes our guidepost.

The payoff for autonomy––call it freedom––is that we live our own life and have control over our own destiny. The payoff for dependency––call it compliance or loyalty––is that if we act on someone else's choice and it does not work out well, ...