“Empowerment isn’t working.”
My lunch companion was the Chief Supply Chain Officer of a national retailer (let’s call him Nick). He’d just left a leadership team meeting and he was frustrated.
AI and automation initiatives were behind schedule. Network localization was mired in red tape. Competitors were at the company’s heels.
Nick already knew his company had to move faster. That’s why he’d given unprecedented decision-making autonomy to his frontline teams.
Yet, eight months later, execution was still too slow.
“I can’t get them to do the things that seem obvious,” he said. “Many of these issues would be solved if they would just take the initiative, but they don’t.”
In my experience, most executives can relate to Nick.
They know traditional, top-down decision-making is too slow.
They know decentralized decision-making models have been proven to enable faster decisions and contingency response[1], and to accelerate innovation output[2] and solution development[3].
But empowerment has not resulted in the speed they need.
Empowered, But Slow
When our clients ask us to help solve this problem, we typically find that leadership is defining empowerment in a particular way—as forfeiting control.
Technically, that isn’t wrong. The Oxford Dictionary defines empowerment as “authority or power given to someone to do something.” So, it’s not surprising that it’s thought of as simply giving up authority over a decision.
When leaders operate according to this definition, they delegate tasks to their teams and then step back, leaving them to figure out the rest for themselves.
“I’ve told them—and keep telling them—they can make the decision,” leaders will say. “I’ve even removed myself from the meeting where the decisions are made so there is no confusion.”
To illustrate what happens next, consider what we discovered while working with a Fortune 10 healthcare company using the “forfeit” model of empowerment.
As part of a multi-year initiative to enhance the value of care, this global organization requested that McChrystal Group assess the impact of its Operations division on its overall objectives.
Our initial diagnostic gathered data from 2,382 division employees. It returned the following results:
Everyone was going to the same place, but conflicts continued to erupt because they were all taking different paths to get there. Even worse, trust in others’ decisions kept splintering.
The division was suffering from a lack of prioritization and effective execution because Operations teams constantly felt pulled in multiple directions. Being told to “work harder” was not enough when nobody agreed on where to focus time and effort.
The culture was passive and risk-averse because decision rights were unclear to employees outside of the executive leadership team. Even with explicit directives from executives, it was easier for these “empowered” employees to make no decision than a decision about which they were uncertain.
One team leader from that organizational study put it this way: “They constantly say we’ve been empowered, but I never know where that begins or ends.”
Empowerment as such is not necessarily adequate to accelerate execution at scale: They key is the model used to empower.
What Senior Leaders Forget they Know
By the time an executive reaches senior leadership, she has spent years steeped in the nuances of getting things done in an organizational hierarchy. The politics, positioning, maneuvering, relationships, and myriad other variables of successful execution come pre-baked in her decisions.
When she “empowers” a more junior person by simply giving him decision authority, he lacks the context that, for her, is intuitive.
She already knows whose interpretation of the strategy is correct. She already knows where and what to prioritize. She already knows who should be accountable for what. And so on.
He does not know these things. And without that context, he lacks confidence in his execution.
That’s why he spends additional time picking his way through land mines before making decisions. Meanwhile, she cannot fathom why he doesn’t just dance around them.
Four Controls that Activate Speed
Research for this lesson first set out to include multiple perspectives from clients and fellow team members—no surprise, these proved invaluable. Still, one person is quoted here more than any other, and for good reason.
McChrystal Group Senior Advisor Bob Wood has experienced empowerment efforts from every angle in his 30-year career at Dow Chemical Company—from sales trainee to the boardroom. He argues that, when it comes to empowerment, too many organizations are attempting to solve the wrong problem.
“Executive leaders say they empower because they want speed,” he said. “That’s why so many approach empowerment as a starting point, which is completely backwards. What they actually want is effective decision-making that results in speed.”
Effective decision-making is a very different place to start. It also requires a very different approach.
- Authority: JSOC leadership did more than merely give decision-making power to lower-level teams. At every level, they also clearly defined which decisions could be made and who could make them, and supported those decisions with constant reinforcement in public forums.
- Capacity: Leaders made sure teams had what they needed to execute decisions through skill development and resource allocation.
- Context: Leaders required teams to understand how their work connected to JSOC’s broader goals, so decisions could be informed and aligned with the overall strategy. This learning was a daily activity that was driven from the top. Everyone was informed of what was happening and where they were going.
- Desire: Leaders also addressed the psychological aspects of empowerment by creating motivation and establishing safe environments for individuals to take more ownership.
Fast, but Wrong
These four controls can make your teams faster, but they can also keep them effective—provided nothing changes.
If your plans from last year remain 100% relevant to this year’s environment, then the four controls may be enough. For the rest of us, we’re lucky if the plans from last month still match the present reality.
JSOC leaders would nod in recognition.
During a mission to apprehend a network of operatives killing civilians across the city, a JSOC team secured files that promised swift success.
“The intelligence gathered had the potential to identify follow-up AQI targets,” explained the Team of Teams authors. “[But] by the time it had navigated the labyrinth of security clearances, and made its way back to our Task Force, four days had passed…[The] network had vanished…Our information had become useless.”
While JSOC’s teams, which included Navy Seals and Army Rangers, were extremely effective and efficient, the rate at which things shifted on the ground meant that they were executing brilliantly on yesterday’s plan.
Something similar happens in many businesses. Customers change, competitors pivot, and new technology disrupts too quickly and too often for strategic planning to keep up. By the time plans disseminate through the organization, they’re outdated.
Speedy execution is good—but when it’s out of alignment with the organization’s objectives, it only gets everyone to the wrong destination faster.
One Control to Rule them All
That was the dilemma a Class I rail and logistics company asked us to help them solve.
The company was at the beginning of a big push to enhance its innovation and operational efficiency. Leadership was struggling to translate this push into well-defined strategic objectives. But the real problem was communicating, driving, and refining these objectives into specific, actionable metrics before macroeconomic forces started to change the context.
At the time, the company’s system meant that translating strategic shifts into updated directives required a minimum of 21 days—a virtual lifetime in the modern logistics industry. This system reflected a time when the world would wait for static plans to be put into action. Simply ensuring faster planning wouldn’t be enough.
So, in addition to helping the leadership team define their top strategic priorities, we set up a completely new kind of update system for translating those priorities into effective action.
At the heart of this system was an operating model based on the lessons learned in Team of Teams. The model fuses strategy and execution into a continuous operating rhythm, enabling leaders to plan, sense, adjust, and act in real time.
The results?
- For each reporting cycle, data input and presentation/report development time dropped from 12 hours to 1 hour.
- Clear insight was produced into how executive-level activities were contributing to key metric success.
- The senior leadership team was finally able to see and manage their priorities in something close to real time.
The takeaway here is that the new update system modernized the company’s outdated focus on alignment—otherwise known as the fifth control in empowered execution.
While the first four controls—authority, context, capacity, and desire—activate faster execution, the fifth control of alignment ensures execution continues to move the needle on the organization’s strategic objectives, regardless of changes in external circumstances.
“Leadership must communicate expectations, context, and goals constantly and at every level of the organization,” said Wood. “As soon as they stop, decision-making fragments and inefficiencies creep in. That’s why leadership must maintain and exercise control over the consistency and clarity of communication with their teams.”
Operationalizing Alignment
- Urgencies eat schedules: In January, year-end goals are no match for the next fire, crisis, or new priority around the corner. Before long, there are way too few months left in the calendar, and the year-end goals become the primary emergency. Executives squeeze out every ounce of energy from their teams to try to hit targets, but despite the push, the mark is still largely missed, engagement suffers, and performance plateaus.
- Environments wreck plans: Management luminary Mike Tyson may have summarized this best when he said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Planning under the presumption that the outside world will adhere to our predictions is equivalent to stepping into the ring without a mouthguard—somebody’s going to end up eating through a straw.
- Objectives: Long-range, measurable goals that provide a clear strategic North Star.
- Strategies: Directional approaches to achieve objectives that guide without micromanaging.
- Initiatives: Tactical actions that deliver the strategy. Unlike goals, initiatives are expected to shift based on real-time context.
- What’s changed in the market?
- What’s the competition doing?
- How have customer expectations shifted?
- What does the data say about our performance?
- A Fortune 50 media company adopted a ROPR rhythm in response to market turbulence in streaming. By embedding financial and content performance reviews every quarter, they rapidly redirected investment toward higher-margin areas, regaining momentum and investor confidence in the same fiscal year.
- A global technology firm applied the ROPR to its people strategy. As AI and cloud services became critical, it replaced annual talent reviews with rolling assessments. High-potential talent was reskilled and redeployed based on strategic demand, not static headcount plans.
- A consumer goods leader reimagined quarterly off-sites as operating checkpoints. Leadership reflected and reallocated capital, shifted messaging, and adjusted incentives within days. The company’s strategy didn’t just adapt; it gained velocity.
A Note for Skeptics
The first successful manned mission to the Moon is generally considered one of the greatest technological achievements in the history of humankind. Less recognized is the managerial challenge of making it possible.
The problem was that, in 1962, NASA’s management model wasn’t built to make history. It consisted of multiple teams working independently of each other and holding their cards close—a structure well suited for exploratory work, but terrible for integrating discovery and development at scale.
Yet within two years, NASA transformed into an organization that prioritized making sure that teams understood the project as a whole, regardless of whether that process took them away from other duties.
Along the way, people complained about the “almost iron-like discipline of organizational communication,” or derided the new processes as “inefficient.”
But they worked.
By 1969, NASA had not only put men on the Moon, it had become the best space program in the world.
When we work with leaders eager to improve the performance of their organizations, we tend to receive varying degrees of pushback on the “inefficient” practices we prescribe.
We get it.
The resource, training, and implementation investment needed to activate the execution speed your organization needs can be significant.
Keeping execution aligned with objectives in an increasingly disruptive world (via ROPR planning cycles and quarterly reviews) demands considerable commitments of time and consistency from leadership.
But it works. Besides—what is the alternative?
Conclusion
Simply delegating authority in the name of “empowerment” does not result in execution speed. It only results in delays, inefficiencies, and frustration for both leaders and teams.
Empowered execution produces speed because it is paired with focused control—where leaders apply their energy to guiding objectives, creating space for teams to operate with freedom, and maintaining alignment through disciplined feedback loops.
In this context, the ROPR framework is a powerful tool. By embedding continuous alignment cycles into the organization’s operations, leaders ensure empowered teams stay aligned with strategic intent, no matter how many punches the outside world throws.
Leaders who move beyond traditional definitions of empowerment and static planning will not only activate execution speed; they will unleash the full potential of their teams and their organizations.
Or as Wood put it:
“Empowerment is not the starting point; it’s the outcome. It only works as a product of a shared common purpose, a clear strategy, and diligent alignment. Otherwise, empowerment is just a word without meaning.”
Join the 11-Week Leadership Unlocked Series
Lessons and Live Sessions, delivered weekly.
