Lack of authority is how you empower your employees and also do they have the authority to make necessary changes within your business or in the division that they are working in. Understand that yes, there are funding constraints and monetary constraints, and not everyone has access to your petty cash or cash reserves to fund their ideas. However, people tend to hide away and shy away from innovation just because of that lack of authority, as they feel that they do not have that power, or they do not feel empowered. They cannot make changes for you; they cannot make changes within the business, so they tend to hide away from your innovation itself.
So yes, I would say that lack of authority also goes hand in hand with empowerment like I’ve been saying now. Yes, we need to start empowering people within our organizations to understand that we may not have access to large sums of cash, we cannot splurge and innovate the anyway we want to. Management also needs to be open minded to the fact that you need to encourage people to innovate and explain to them that, “if your project is going to involve or require some kind of funding, speak to us, we are here, we are going to listen to you, and we are going to give you the various tools that you would need begin to support you.” So, lack of authority also comes with support from line management, senior management lower management such as team leaders, and sometimes also just some staff morale like the staff that work with one another. It is all about engagement and how you, and your staff are receptive to one another’s ideas and feedback.
If there is animosity within the team, then your team is not going to grow in the manner you would like them to, and they will be so despondent, to the changes that you wanting to implement. The need to understand that regardless of what happens, there’s going to be change within your organization. I would say empower your staff to always innovate and take away that lack of authority so people feel that they can decide on their own accord which could better your business and management. People’s acceptance needs to be discussed in terms of innovations barriers and enablers. With that we need to understand that there’s going to be individuals who are going to be a stumbling block where they’re not going to accept the change that you as management or as the owner of your businesses, are wanting to make. It is all about getting that buy in from your staff members, you need to understand what it is that hampers your performance, or what it is that makes them despondent to change.
With that said, if you engage with you employees, if they are not afraid of change, if you have confirmed that radical change can come at any time they need to be accepting of it. They need to understand that there is a point in time where managers and owners of businesses need to just take a stand and make changes right then and there. There’s no time to still baffle or speak to them or consult them about it. Unfortunately, this is how business is and in today’s times and the way the world is moving, radical change needs to take place now. There is no time to say “everyone, we’re going to do X, Y and Z.” After all, it is a dog-eat-dog world out there. There comes a point in time where we can say “yes, we have time to speak, chat, brainstorm and make changes,” but there are times when executives appear to be saying, “I need profit, I need revenue, I need turnaround times now I need better service, I need change, and there’s the deadline.”
People need to be accepting of changes that are going to come and it all comes down to, engaging your staff and making sure that they are always on board with what is going to happen. Yes, people acceptance, that’s one thing that you need to take into consideration and that’s one thing that you need to engage your staff with consistently. There is one quote that says, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change, to understand the things that I can change and the wisdom to know the difference.”
There are just certain things in life that is not going simply change because you want it to change or not. We need to ensure that our employees who are working on the ground are not forgotten as they are the biggest game changes in our organisations today.
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BM Project Solutions
