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Westside Toastmasters is located in Los Angeles and Santa Monica, California

EMPOWERMENT LEARNING ACTIVITIES

Learning to be an inner leader engages the individual leader in behaviors like the following that may be useful to leaders to gain experience and comfort in caring for followers.

Activity 1: Blocks to Empowerment

Introduction. This activity is designed to help participants recognize the readiness of the work community and its members to accept empowerment and recognize the potential blocks to its implementation.

  1. Complete the following questionnaire by checking the appropriate box either yes or no. For each question, think about the current state of your work community or department and tell us what it is.

    Yes

    No

     

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    __

    1. Is your work community undergoing major change and transition?

    ___

    ___

    2. Is your work community a startup or new venture?

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    3. Is your work community facing increasing competitive pressures?

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    4. Is your work community a hierarchical bureaucracy?

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    5. Is the predominant leadership in your work community authoritarian and top down?

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    6. Is there a great deal of negativism like rehashing and focus on failures?

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    7. Are employees provided with reasons for the work community's decisions and actions?

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    8. Are performance expectations and goals clearly stated?

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    9. Are goals realistic and achievable?

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    10. Are rewards clearly tied to performance or the accomplishment of work-community goals and mission?

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    11. Are rewards based on competence and accomplishments?

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    12. Is innovation encouraged and rewarded?

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    13. Are there many opportunities for participation?

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    14. Are most tasks routine and repetitive?

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    15. Are resources generally appropriate for performing the tasks?

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    16. Are opportunities for interaction with senior management limited?

    Scoring key: For items 1 through 6 and 14 and 16, give a score of 1 if you have marked Yes, 0 if you have checked No. For items 7 through 13 and item 15, give a score of 0 to Yes responses and 1 to No.

    Analysis. The maximum possible score is 16. The closer you have rated your work community to that maximum score, the less ready it is for implementation of empowerment. An analysis of individual items can point to specific blocks to the implementation of empowerment.

  2. What are the key blocks to empowerment in your workplace?

  3. What is the role of the inner leader in empowering the team? List as many tasks as you can.

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