Walking The Empowerment Tightrope: Balancing Management Authority & Employee Influence

Effectively leading your work group is the key task for all managers. Yet, most manager/supervisors are self-taught and get promoted for being excellent individual contributors. How to manage well is a different challenge. This book is built around 25 high-performance factors with findings gleaned from data across 600 companies. First presented at a NASA quality conference, each factor has action steps outlined especially aimed at mid-managers and supervisors. Besides the practical tools needed, it also helps managers find balance in how they use their management authority. Most managers tend to exercise either too much management authority or the other extreme, abdication; this issue is addressed head on. When a manager is clear about how to use their authority in a balanced way, everyone gets appropriately empowered, including the manager themselves. This results in a workplace with open and accountable employees striving towards success.