I’ve never really liked the word empowerment, it’s just an acronym for delegation. The dictionary defines delegation as—authorizing subordinates to make certain decisions, and  empowerment as—give or delegate power or authority. Many people, myself included, have used the word empowerment to mean something more than delegation, but that extra meaning has been fuzzy. Empowerment has been used in conjunction with self-organizing teams, but often been carried too far, as trying to delegate far more authority to agile teams than was prudent. Similarly, as projects grew from a single team to multiple teams, certain decisions had to be made by specialty teams. So were these teams empowered, or not? Were they “empowered” or “pseudo-powered.” Empowerment also …

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