A workshop exploring disempowerment and how we can tackle it
Workshop
We know that people who are empowered are more creative, more productive and more satisfied with their work and so produce better results for their organisations. So why is there so much disempowerment in the workplace?
In this workshop we’ll share our experiences of disempowerment, invent even more ways to disempower our teams and colleagues and discuss how we might identify the signs of disempowerment when it’s happening to others.
We’ll then work together to figure out what could be done differently to move from a disempowered organisation to an empowered one.
Participants will take away:
- A better understanding of empowerment
- Insights into what disempowerment looks like
- A better understanding of the causes of disempowerment
- Options for tackling disempowerment
We might cover some tough topics that are very personal in this session but participants are free to decide how much they share of their own experiences.
No previous experience needed
Participants will take away:
- A better understanding of empowerment
- Insights into what disempowerment looks like
- A better understanding of the causes of disempowerment
- Options for tackling disempowerment
It should also be fun.
Small slide deck. The session is mainly activity-based though.
I’ll set the scene then we’ll go straight into facilitated group activities.
All timings are approximate.
00:00 - 05:00
Welcome, introductions and motivation for the session
05:00 - 25:00
Activity #1 - Anti-problem - What more can we do to disempower our teams and our colleagues?
Participants will work in groups to share ideas - either real, or invented - for disempowering people.
Each group will post-up (on a wall or flip chart paper) their solutions to this anti-problem and organise those solutions into themes e.g. organisational rules that disempower. Groups will then play back their findings to the whole room.
I will act as overall facilitator.
More on the Anti-problem here: http://gamestorming.com/the-anti-problem/
25:00-30:00 I'll briefly review some disempowerment themes that I've encountered in my prior work.
30:00 - 50:00
Activity #2 Case Study discussion
I'll distribute a few real-life case studies that may or may not be examples of disempowerment. Each group will discuss the example and decide - whether it is an example of disempowerment, who is being disempowered, what the root cause might be, how might they as an observer intervene and how likely that intervention will succeed
50:00-70:00
Activity #3
Some people argue that one can only empower oneself and not be empowered by others.
In this final activity we'll attempt to identify and share examples of how we have empowered ourselves in our work or personal lives.
We'll look at our own circumstances in each case to try and understand the characteristics of the situation that enabled us or prevented us from empowering ourselves. How did we empower ourselves? How could we have been prevented from empowering ourselves? When did we decide we were going to empower ourselves? What were the triggers? Could it have gone wrong?
70:00 - 75:00
I will close the session with a few observations on the main findings of the session and some pointers for further research.
Take a look at https://medium.com/@markdalgarno/some-reading-on-dis-empowerment-756662f027ed for further reading.
I've run variants of this workshop 5 times now at meetups, conferences and a client.