STAGE ONE:
JOURNEY STARTING AND ORIENTING THE JOURNEY

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Given that empowerment (releasing the power within people) leads to astonishing results, leaders want to know how to start the journey to empowerment. Indeed, they usually want to know how to get there by yesterday. Unfortunately, the journey takes a little more time than that. This first stage of the process of changing to empowerment is filled with excitement combined with anxiety and a lack of knowledge of what empowerment means for the behaviors of everyone involved. According to Situational Leadership® II, this stage is a time for providing clear direction to focus people’s natural but naive enthusiasm. There are many new skills to learn, and clear leadership is the key to meeting the needs people have.

In this section, we will focus on Starting and Orienting the Journey to empowerment. We will explore how each of the three keys to empowerment can help in meeting this initial challenge. Our format will be to pose questions that leaders often have about changing to empowerment and then provide one or more answers in short paragraphs. We will also insert examples from actual organizational experiences with the empowerment process. The first key we will focus on is information sharing, since it is the best way to really kick-start the process of change. We will then explore the other two keys to empowerment: creating autonomy through boundaries, and letting teams replace the hierarchy. Remember, it is vital to use all three keys to successfully move forward with the change to empowerment. So let us turn to information sharing as the critical first key in the process.