Someone sent me a note asking 'I wonder if you are interested in writing a blog for the resource pack for the Culture tool? It is missing a few stories about how others 'do things'. I thought of you for the bit on empowering.'
The Culture Tool is a discussion diagnostic where teams talk about various questions and then rate themselves. When all the questions have been rated a radar chart is generated and the group then decides what, if anything, they want to do to change the picture. The question on empowerment reads: 'To what extent do you feel your team/ group are confident/able to empower people?'
Thinking about this, it seems to me that the question behind that question is about the relationship between power/control/autonomy and empowering. The nature of the statement 'able to empower people' suggests that empowerment is a gift given by those with power to those without power, and if that is the case then the gift could be withdrawn as part of a control system.
I found several discussions on this as I started to explore my line of thinking. For example, an HBR article by Robert Simons, Control in an Age of Empowerment. He wrote it in 1995, and although I'm not keen on the mechanistic language, I found he has interesting and topical ideas around types of control 'levers': diagnostic, beliefs, boundary and interactive.