Denkwerkstatt für Manager

Geschwill & Nieswandt

An IT company wants to implement empowerment

An IT company with 1,000 employees worldwide adopts an idea from Microsoft to implement empowerment. The Denkwerkstatt Courage Case contains tools for this topic.
When Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he was not the only one surprised - even insiders had not expected it. Before him, founder Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer were two people who were CEOs and who differed significantly in their behavior, thinking and attitudes.

Microsoft was all about change. Nadella once put it this way "...the transformation that is taking place in me today and in our company, spurred on by a sense of empathy and a desire to empower others to work independently and autonomously. It's about how people, organizations and societies can and must transform in their constant pursuit of new energy, new ideas, new relevance and overall renewal."

Satya Nadella calls it pressing the refresh button and quotes the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke: "The future shows itself to us long before it happens."
We just have to recognize it in ourselves and thus the idea of having empowerment conversations was born.

 What is empowerment?

Empowerment is geared towards empowering people to draw on their own strengths and achieve self-determination and autonomy. It is essential that people make as many decisions as possible in their workplace themselves and take responsibility for them.

What is the positive purpose of empowerment?

For the organization:

In a complex world, empowerment makes companies faster and more efficient. Microsoft employs knowledge workers. Knowledge workers know more than their bosses. Spotify formulates: Employees make 70 times better decisions than bosses in tech companies.

For humans:

People in organizations trust in their own strengths and develop a growth mindset. At Microsoft, a growth mindset is an important element of empowerment as opposed to a fixed mindset.

How does it work?

The growth mindset determines how you deal with problems, challenges and tasks. 
Here are three examples:

  • For example, whether you think: "Just don't make a mistake." Or: "I'll manage somehow."
  • Whether you think: "I can't." Or: "If it's really important to me, I'll just learn it."

  • Whether the limitations in your life are decisive for you or the opportunities that open up around every corner. People with a growth mindset are courageous, like to take control of their working life and are happier (at Google employee happiness and especially they are curious and invest in their own qualifications for the job.

The MUT case contains the original "Growth Mindset" concept, as implemented by Microsoft in one-to-one meetings with each employee. However, this is the model of a large corporation. For SMEs, we have developed a blank empowerment questionnaire that managers can adapt for their own company. In the IT company, the concept, which Microsoft has rolled out worldwide, is now an integral part of personnel development discussions.