Dear Bob, I know you advocate empowering employees. In my experience, empowerment is fine IF the people empowered know what they are doing. At the company I used to work at, the VP of Finance empowered the managers in the Finance department. They took this as "delegate your work". They delegated their work to the subordinates who then delegated it to MIS. (This freed up the managers in Finance Dear Bob,I know you advocate empowering employees. In my experience, empowerment is fine IF the people empowered know what they are doing.At the company I used to work at, the VP of Finance empowered the managers in the Finance department. They took this as “delegate your work”. They delegated their work to the subordinates who then delegated it to MIS. (This freed up the managers in Finance to run “Survivor” and “Football” pools). Meanwhile, MIS was swamped with report requests; all of them custom (of course). When MIS couldn’t keep up, subordinates complained to their managers who then complained to the VP of Finance. These managers blamed MIS for missing deadlines on reporting. After 2 years of this chaos, VP of Finance decided to outsource the MIS department. The reason? “To get rid of an obstacle.”– Empowerment victimDear Victim … We’d agree if you turn your statement around. The formula I use is “SCAR,” which stands for “Skills, Context, Authority, Responsibility.”Empowerment works when, as part of the program of empowering employees, you give them the Skills and Context they need to make good decisions (Authority). Otherwise you’re stuck in an endless chicken-and-egg loop in which employees aren’t empowered because they don’t know what they’re doing, and never learn what they need to know because the only way to get it is to make the mistakes you make when you have the authority to try things.Once you’ve provided the training to provide specific skills and the information needed for context, you can start to increase the authority employees have to make decisions because they now have the tools to do so effectively. At which point it makes sense to make employees responsible for their decision-making. The tricky part here, of course, is who gets to define “good decision” – it isn’t as if managers have the keys to all wisdom, after all. Which is why managers should hold employees accountable for their decision-making, not for the specific decisions. If employees went through an appropriate process and made a logical call, that should be enough.The situation you describe isn’t a matter of empowerment gone wrong. It’s a failure of leadership, a very different matter. The evidence is early in your description – they decided to empower the managers. If that was a “decision” and wasn’t an ongoing state of affairs, I have to wonder what the managers were for before the VP of Finance empowered them.Which is to say – it was way too messed up to fix in a weblog. – Bob ——– Technology Industry