Since ancient times, in the constant search for the optimization of resources and the maximization of profits with the least investment, administrators, scholars, researchers, have developed countless techniques, tools, strategies, including philosophies to improve the organizational performance, such as: JIT (just in time "Just in Time"), CT (total quality "Total Quality"), TQC (total quality control "Total Quality Control"), MRP (management of production requirements " Management Requirement Production "), reengineering, quality circles, self-directed groups, TPM (total production management" Total Production Management "), which are sometimes implemented and are part of the organization while others only use it while they are Fashion.
And so, with the passing of time, evolution, development, revolutions in all areas (social, scientific, technological and intellectual) and with them maturity and awareness, today we come across something that for many is something new, something new, for others it is something that has not fully bloomed, it is something that has not finished being digested and accepted by many, yes, I am talking about "empowerment - empowerment".
The word "empowerment" comes from the verb "to empower" and means: to give or grant power; empower, enable, empower, authorize, empower, empower, allow, empower, grant the right or the power to, confer powers, empower, commission, among other meanings. In Spanish, there is no equivalent word. An approximate meaning would be given by the terms empowerment, empowerment, empowerment or attribution of power. Sykes highlights the positive objective implied in the term alluding to the sense of autonomy, sense of control and satisfaction that feels empowered.
The broader concept of empowerment consists of granting, yielding, giving or delegating power, command and authority to subordinates and granting or conferring on them the feeling that they own their own work.
For Lloyd and Berthelot in their book “Develop Your Potential (Self-Empowerment), A Guide to Personal Success”, empowering someone means, “that you must be given authority to make decisions and act, without having need to seek approval every time "and adds that this means" letting people use their own intelligence, experience, intuition and creativity to help the organization improve and succeed. " It also means "keeping people informed and involving them in the operations of the organization" as well as "listening to them and taking advantage of their ideas".
In this same order of ideas, Terry Wilson in his Empowerment Manual, "How to get the best out of your collaborators", expresses that empowerment " consists of enhancing the motivation and results of all the collaborators of a company through the delegation and the transmission of power ”.
On the other hand, the Foundation for International Relations and Foreign Dialogue (FRIDE) tells us: "the definitions vary according to the disciplines that use it: psychology, political science, education, law or economics, among others." This can even generate diametrically opposite visions of what empowerment is effectively and how it can become viable. As an example, in the field of business management it can be understood that one way to empower employees is to give them the possibility to make certain decisions and be more autonomous in their work. However, this can be branded, from other disciplines, as being a pseudo-empowerment since the original distribution of power within the company remains intact.
From another angle, we have that for the World Bank, the term empowerment has different meanings in different sociocultural and political contexts, and it is not easy to translate into all languages. Among the terms associated with the idea of empowerment are terms such as "personal strength", "control", "personal power", "own choice", and ideas such as "dignified life in accordance with the person's own values", " ability to fight for your own rights ”,“ independence ”,“ make your own decisions ”and“ be free ”.
And so the latter, through Narayan, tells us: " empowerment is the expansion of goods and capacities of poor people to participate in, negotiate with, influence, control, and hold institutions that affect their lives accountable." And while he acknowledges that this is a very specific concept for each context, and that different cultures, groups and people can conceive of it in different ways, he argues that there are four common elements for efforts to empowerment to be fruitful: access to information; inclusion and participation; Pay accounts; and the capacity for local organization.
It also identifies three main channels through which empowerment would increase development effectiveness: due to its impacts on good governance and growth; for making growth pro-poor; and by promoting the achievement of the results of development projects.
Unquestionably, the uncritical and lax use that is often made of the term 'empowerment' in theory and practice hides a problematic concept. In fact, regardless of the meaning we use of the term, we find that in the praxis related to any of the concepts we use, "Power" emerges as the tip of the iceberg, being the object of numerous debates in all the social sciences. Definitions run across the multidisciplinary spectrum and stroll through different degrees of subtlety, in the ability of one person or group to get another person or group to do something against their will. This 'power' is located in decision-making processes, in conflicts and strength, in love, friendship or legitimacy, and could be described as 'zero-sum' power since, the more power a person has, less has the other.
Perhaps the difficulty and complexity that circumscribes the term "power", is transferred to the term and the thing is really complicated when trying to generalize, an act that we should definitely rule out.
In this way we find two great contexts, they are not the only ones, but they are the most outstanding: the social and business fabric.
1. The business fabric
The idea behind it is that those who are directly related to a task are the best suited to make a decision about it, on the understanding that they possess the skills required for it.
Among the various reasons that inspire an interest of the are "global competitiveness, the need to respond quickly to the demands and expectations of customers and the demand for greater autonomy on the part of an increasingly prepared workforce. Empowerment means that superiors have to share their authority and power with their subordinates. "
On the other hand, the leadership model must necessarily shift from "yoismo", from "position power" to "people's power", "the power of US", in which all team members are they give leadership roles so that they can contribute to the best of their abilities. He offers the potential to take advantage of an underutilized source of human capacity that has to be used so that organizations not only survive in an increasingly complex and dynamic world but also subsist in an environment of harmony in search of maximum happiness..
The main objective of the is based on three cardinal points:
• Share information with all members of the organization.
• Autonomy through borders.
• Replace hierarchy with self-directed teams.
At this moment the words of Drucker come to my memory:
“ The modern organization has to be an organization of equals, of colleagues and associates, because it consists of specialists in knowledge. No knowledge is superior to another; each is judged by his contribution to the common task rather than by any intrinsic superiority or inferiority. Therefore, the modern organization cannot be a boss and subordinate organization. You have to organize as a team. "
Now, if we start from the undeniable fact that human talent and its knowledge are the most important resources within organizations, we must then consider a new administration, successor to, through which an organization and its full human potential would be prepared and forged. with superior aptitudes and attitudes through Ethics and Organizational Values in favor of maximum individual and collective happiness.
In my view, we should develop a new paradigm, Administration by Values and Ethics.
2. The social fabric
For the development of this point, I will borrow some paragraphs from the work of José G. Vargas-Hernández “The New Forms of Transnational Governance in the Scenario of Economic Rationality of Globalization Processes”, where he tells us:
Empowerment of communities should give the capacity to evaluate the performance of officials in order to influence public administration, which would make them become civil servants. Knowing that the different actors are evaluated has multiplying effects for the entire community. Unfortunately, in the symbiotic relationships that appear to exist between large transnational corporations and imperial nation-states, companies are the partners who lean in favor of corporations.
Despite this, the great interests of transnational corporations always attempt against the regulatory action of the State in order to obtain the highest profit rates, by acquiring raw materials and resources at a lower cost and in abundance, to penetrate new markets and to achieve lower levels of transaction costs in marketing operations.
Marshall, Wray, Epstein and Grifel establish an ideal model of governance based on the accepted practices of three elements to obtain effective governance: citizen involvement, performance measurement and implementation of government policy. Ideally, a community can align the three elements to obtain the best results from public and private resources, above all, measure the results expected by citizens.
Therefore, both actors, government and citizens take the lead in setting goals, initiating dialogue, stimulating change, and measuring results. The collective representations of the reality of individuals affect the yearnings for change. By changing the order of social life due to the impacts of globalization on differentiations in social structures, cultural and social structures are also modified.
Both the government and citizens have important roles to play. According to this model, the connections to improve administration and build effective governance are the administrative performance of the government, citizens who are involved in performance measurement, and citizens who are involved in government policy and its implementation, and finally, the strategic alignment of the three elements of governance referred to as such to the nature and structure of access to the high command functions of the State.
Now, I consider it extremely important to highlight the need to NOT confuse participation with empowerment. Participation programs can be an effective instrument to promote empowerment, but a political or superficial use of this tool will hardly lead to empowerment.
Achieving real empowerment requires that the initiatives that provide such empowerment, impact both individually and socially and at the governmental level, for this to really crystallize, there must necessarily be prior training so that the recipient is prepared to absorb and execute the empowerment granted.
It is useless, rather it is a simple fallacy to try to empower someone who does not have the maturity, the conscience, the knowledge, who does not use the necessary tools to execute and assert the received empowerment.
In this context, the goal of empowerment is to give people the power and capacities necessary to change their lives, improve their communities and influence their destinies. In doing so, they put the individual at the center of policies, owners of their rights and drivers of their development.
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