Preface

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Our first book on empowerment, titled Empowerment Takes More Than a Minute and published in 1996 by Berrett-Koehler Publishers, has been a popular introduction to the challenges of creating a culture of empowerment. We have been gratified to see it on the Business Week Best Sellers List and to have it translated into ten languages besides English. By all accounts this book has been a success and has helped many managers and employees release the power within people for astonishing results.

What has been apparent also is that efforts to move to empowerment always raise questions for managers and employees alike. These questions are often quite detailed, and their answers were not always apparent in our first book. This second book, The 3 Keys to Empowerment, asks and answers those questions and provides a three-stage road map for the journey of changing to empowerment.

Everyone seems to agree that employees, managers, and companies can benefit from creating a culture in which people could be empowered. Involving employees in an empowered culture allows them to use their knowledge, experience, x and internal motivation to accomplish tasks for the organization. Employees become team members who are accountable for results that benefit the organization in both tangible and intangible ways. Employees also experience a sense of ownership, excitement, and pride in their work. Managers become team leaders who facilitate the involvement of team members. They find that results are achieved much easier than in a hierarchical culture, and they develop a new sense of pride from developing empowered teams that achieve far more than anyone thought possible.

The difficulty that everyone experiences is that talking about empowerment is a lot easier than creating a culture in which it can prosper. The title of our first book was designed to let people know that the movement from hierarchy to empowerment would not be easy. It would take more than an announcement, more than a wish, more than a small effort, indeed, “more than a minute.” It is not an easy task to give up the assumptions, behaviors, and systems (policies and procedures) that worked well in a hierarchical culture and replace them with assumptions, behaviors, and systems that support and expect empowerment, but it is doable in steps and in stages.

The 3 Keys to Empowerment is intended to be a guidebook for the journey. It is not a book designed for you to sit down and read in a few sittings, except to gain an overview of the issues. Rather, it is a user’s guide for the journey to Empowerment. The 3 Keys to Empowerment will help you keep on task and will definitely increase the speed of your journey. Think of your questions as you progress, find them in the various sections, and also find your answers. We know that this guidebook will make your journey much easier and xi will give you the confidence to continue. If you have questions that you cannot find in this book, please send them to us and we will provide you with our best thinking on that issue. We want you to succeed in reaching empowerment, so let this guidebook—and us as references—help you along the way.

Good luck to you as you undertake this most important and challenging journey! We are confident that the effort is worth it because in empowerment, you will release the power within people for astonishing results.

Ken Blanchard    John Carlos    Alan Randolph