Empowerment

Empowerment is an interesting concept in leadership because it basically states that in order to be a good leader, one has to train other people to be a good leader.  This logic seems a little contradictory, and it can be, as history has shown many powerful people who raised followers that eventually became more powerful than themselves.  As with anything else, balance is the key-a good balance between leading and empowering provides the ultimate state of leadership.

One of the central tenets of empowerment is trust.  According to what we learned in class, trust is a cycle-empowering followers with trust increases trust in management, and so on.  I can see how this is a reasonable argument, especially in my own life experiences.  As someone who has volunteered in many different situations, my favorite is the summer music camp in my hometown where I have worked every summer for the past five years.  It is here where I have by far the most responsibility, since I not only help the director run the camp with logistical tasks but actually mentor and teach the students as well.  With all these comes a lot of trust, as the director has enough faith in me to entrust so much responsibility to me.  By being so important I not only feel better as a person, but I am able to do more of what I want to, such as actually working with and teaching campers, because I am trusted to do so.

However, as previously stated, balance is very important because I feel that too much empowerment can end very badly.  I had to work recently on a research paper with a partner, which personally I hate because it is so much more efficient for one person to put together an essay, even if it is more work-two people rarely can just throw together two chunks of work and call it a successful essay.  However, in this case I had to work with a partner, and we did just that-we split up the essay into chunks for piecing together and editing at a later date.  Unfortunately, during editing I discovered that my partner's contribution was nowhere near adequate, as it contained significantly less information, it was not written as well structurally, and some of it was flat out wrong.  As a result I wrote most of the paper because much of my partner's work had to be rewritten.  In this case, trusting my partner to write freely did not end well.

Trust is essential in developing good leadership because it is so cyclical.  However, it still requires a balance for it to work efficiently; as my life experiences show, empowerment can work two ways, with very different results.