Unsupervised With Anxiety

Most leaders say the word empowerment like it's a gift — announced in kickoff meetings, written into competency frameworks, then quietly broken over twelve weeks as the manager walks back in and starts redirecting work. The word gets used. The conditions never get built. The team ends up managing the manager instead of the work.

This episode is about what has to be in place before empowerment means anything. Jackson and Scott Morris — former CHRO, founder of Propulsion AI — break down the Empowerment Contract: three conditions that separate Mara (prototype in three weeks, zero oversight) from Dana (twelve weeks, no framework, left the company four months later). Most empowerment failures trace directly back to prep work the manager didn't do.

What You'll Learn

• Empowerment is an environment, not a declaration — the conditions have to exist before the word can hold weight
• The three elements of the Empowerment Contract: outcome clarity, boundary conditions, and decision rights — and what each requires before work starts
• Why your most capable people are the most likely to get inadvertently undercut — and why your expertise is sometimes the obstacle
• Three to five named constraints beats a ten-page delegation framework every time
• An open door policy is not a decision framework — how to tell your team exactly which decisions need you and which don't
• How to repair the empowerment contract after you've already broken it, including the debrief most leaders keep skipping

Key Quotes

"Without outcome clarity, boundary conditions, and decision rights — empowered means unsupervised with anxiety."

"The team heard a promise, then watched the manager break it in slow motion."

"Trust without outcome clarity is hope. Trust without boundary conditions is a setup. Trust without decision rights is something nice you said before you walked in and changed everything."

"Naming limits feels like losing control — when it's actually the only thing that creates it."

Sources for Statistics Cited

• ~23% of employees globally feel engaged at work — Gallup State of the Global Workplace: 2024 Report

Transcript

The assumption is that empowerment is a declaration — that announcing it creates it magically. It's not the way it really works. It is an environment. It's not a statement. The conditions have to be built before the word can hold any weight at all. Without outcome clarity, boundary conditions, and decision rights, I'd argue that empowered means unsupervised with anxiety.

JACKSON: Well, hey there, senior leader, and welcome to the Talent Sherpa Podcast. This is where senior leaders come to rethink how human capital really works. I'm your host, Jackson Lynch, and today I am joined by my co-host, Scott Morris. He's a former CHRO with the scar tissue to prove it, the possible inventor of a leadership philosophy he cannot fully explain at a dinner party, and the founder of Propulsion AI.

Now, Scott, here's what I keep running into. Leaders say the word empowerment like it is this gift — it's manna from heaven. It's like saying it out loud is the work. But you and I have both been in rooms where the manager announced that the team was empowered, and then three weeks later they walked in and rewrote the entire damn deliverable. And nobody said anything because nobody was surprised. I've done that — I gotta be honest — and I suspect you have too.

SCOTT: Not only have I been the manager who has done that, but I have worked for the manager who has done it. It's a cycle. Hey, I'm excited to pull this one apart with you. But before we dive into this, Jackson — do us a favor, everyone — please subscribe to the podcast right now, or leave us a comment, or drop us a quick review on your preferred platform. Those methods are how we grow the pod and how we keep the content sharp for other senior leaders.

JACKSON: Yeah, that's super helpful. So here is what I think is actually happening out there. Empowerment has become one of those words that lives on every engagement survey, every leadership development curriculum, every town hall deck. And yet Gallup tells us that only about 23% of employees globally feel engaged at work. And that number has barely moved in a decade. And if it has moved, it's gone down. So something is not connecting.

SCOTT: And you know what I think is not connecting? Most managers treat the concept of empowerment like a posture, not a contract. They say it, and I think a lot of them mean it. They genuinely want their people to own the work. But they skip the part where they actually define what ownership means. They skip the hard work that they have to do.

And I think there's a second thing underneath that. Most managers have never had to name their own constraints before. They know what they will and won't tolerate, but they've never been asked to write it down before handing off the work. So the team inherits a set of invisible rules — what I think we can only think of as invisible rules — that become visible when somebody breaks one. And that's bad timing.

JACKSON: Exactly. And that gap — the gap between intending to empower someone and actually setting them up to be empowered — that's where trust quietly dies.

And let me give you a real example from my own work. A few years ago, I was a CHRO at a mid-sized company in Atlanta. We had a very serious problem with onboarding. New hires were hitting their 90-day mark feeling overwhelmed, unprepared, and honestly a little misled about the job they had taken. Turnover in the first year was running hot in a really important function.

And I had a direct report — we're going to call her Mara. She was sharp, motivated, and ready to lead something. So before I handed it off to her, I sat her down and named three outcomes. I want us to get new hires productive faster. I want us to create a genuine "I'm glad I joined" feeling at the 90-day mark. And I want to stay clean on the compliance side.

And then I told her the walls of the sandbox. There's no spending over $5,000 without talking to me. No asking another function to change their process without looping me in first. No commitments we can't walk back. No irrevocable bets. Everything else — it's hers. Go build it.

So she built the team. She ran agile sprints. She delivered a working prototype in about three weeks. Let me say that again: three weeks. I did not attend a single working session. I got a status update at week two. I signed off on her final version. And then I watched her present it to the leadership team with zero anxiety. And if you know her, that's quite something. She owned every decision in that room.

SCOTT: And you know what? That version, Jackson — that version is what most managers never see, because they never do the prep work you just described.

And there are elements in what you just said that we're going to pull apart one by one in this episode. But let me paint the contrast for the audience. This is not my personal example, but it is absolutely one that I watched.

Let's say we have a manager and her direct report, Dana. Dana was handed a similar challenge in a different company — rebuild a core process, 12 weeks of work, and she was "fully empowered," as the manager liked to say.

Week three, that manager walks in and starts redirecting things. Week five, that manager is joining the working sessions. Week eight, the manager flagged that the framing was off a little bit and asked the team to go back to the drawing board. Week ten, Dana brought in a revised version and the manager said it was close, but it needed more work. Week twelve, the team submitted what they had finally developed, and the manager shelved everything and said the timing wasn't right.

That's a bad story. But here's the worst punchline: four months later, Dana leaves the company.

And here's the part that makes that story worse. The manager in that story genuinely believed she was being helpful every single time she stepped in. Each intervention, I think, to her felt like she was saving the team. What she never saw was the accumulated weight of twelve weeks of corrections with no framework, no boundary, no decision rights. She turned a capable person — Dana — into somebody who stopped trusting their own judgment. The project never shipped. That manager was the root cause, but Dana became the reason.

JACKSON: Yeah. I love that because I talk about assuming positive intent a lot. And as I listen to your story, I'm like, that manager doesn't know what they're doing. But that "doesn't know" is really, really important — they thought they were acting in the best interest of the team. It wasn't malicious. So I really appreciate the way you phrase that.

And here's the implication: the word empowerment becomes a lie. Not an intentional lie, but functionally, it's a lie. Because the team heard a promise, then they watched the manager break it in slow motion.

So that's actually what we're going to dig into today. Not the intention behind empowerment — which is, I'd say, usually genuine — but the three conditions that made Mara's story work, and what happens to the team when you skip them.

So let's dive in. We'll call out a few of the faulty assumptions that get leaders stuck.

The first one — and we've all heard this — is: "I empowered them." The manager said the word, so the contract's complete. This is how it actually functions, even though no one would agree with it if you said it as plainly as I just did. The assumption is that empowerment is a declaration, that announcing it creates it magically. It's not the way it really works. Empowerment is an environment; it's not a statement. The conditions have to be built before the word can hold any weight at all. So without outcome clarity, boundary conditions, and decision rights, I'd argue that empowered means unsupervised with anxiety.

SCOTT: Yeah, I think that's right. Here's another one: "They know what good looks like. These are smart people. I don't need to tell them." The assumption here is that capability and clarity are the same thing — that a talented person is somehow just going to intuit what the destination is in the manager's mind.

But the reality is, Jackson, that smart people make fast decisions in ambiguous environments. And some of those decisions may be exactly wrong. And when the manager comes in and overrides them, the smart person doesn't learn what good looks like. They learn that the manager can't be trusted to stay out of the work.

JACKSON: Which leads me to the next assumption: "I'm staying close because I care about the outcome." The manager frames their intervention as investment rather than control. And, stealing from you earlier — they probably genuinely believe this. It doesn't feel that way.

The assumption is that presence equals support, that showing up in the working session is real-time coaching rather than surveillance. But here's the reality: when you attend every meeting, your presence actually changes the meeting. The team is no longer solving the problem — they are managing you inside the meeting. Your proximity consumes the oxygen that autonomy needs to grow. And that's part of the empowerment process.

SCOTT: Nobody wants to micromanage. But that's exactly what happens when that work doesn't get done up front.

And I think a lot of managers will go to this fourth assumption, again with the best of intentions: "They should have come to me if they needed something." Because why? Because "I have an open door policy," or "I told them they could come to me."

The assumption is somehow that the open door is a substitute for a defined decision framework — that availability is the same thing as clarity. It's just not.

Open door policies — and we should all have them, we want teams to come to us — but open doors don't help if the team doesn't understand which decisions require them to walk through that door and check. Without decision rights, without clarity about who gets to decide what, everything feels like there's potential for an override. So people are either going to stop, or they're going to over-escalate, or they're going to stop without escalating entirely. None of those are really good. Both outcomes bury the manager and confuse the team.

The one I keep coming back to, Jackson, is number two from our list: "People know what good looks like because they're smart." We hire for capability and then we withhold — not intentionally, but we still withhold — the context that makes the capability we hired for useful. And when the person fails to read our minds, we call it a development gap.

What makes this one particularly insidious is that it feels like a compliment: "You're smart, you'll figure it out, I'm not worried about it." But what we're really saying is: I don't want to do the work. I don't want to do the work of describing what's in my head that controls the difference between a good outcome and a not-good outcome. Which means the capable person spends their energy reverse-engineering the manager's mental model instead of actually solving the problem. Or they spend a lot of time getting disappointed over and over again when they don't reach whatever was in the manager's head that was never shared.

JACKSON: Yeah. And where I see it most is in managers who are the strongest at their work — the ones who are genuinely expert. Because the more clear a picture you have of what good looks like in your head, the harder it is to describe in a way somebody else can use. In this really perverse way, your knowledge — your expertise — is in fact the obstacle.

Pulling back a little: the truth underneath all of this is that empowerment is not something you give; it is something you build. Those are different verbs. And most of us were never taught why you would pick one verb over the other.

SCOTT: Before you say the word, you have to do the work. And that work is hard. You've got to think through what good looks like. You've got to think through what your conditions are — what you don't want people to stray outside of. Those conditions are what we're about to walk through. These are the materials. And this isn't theory — these are the specific things that made Mara's story land in three weeks, and made Dana's story cost somebody their job.

So how do we move from empowerment as a declaration to empowerment as a design? There are three conditions that have to exist before the word empowerment means anything at all. We're calling this the Empowerment Contract. And until all three are in place, the manager hasn't actually done their full job.

JACKSON: Right. And we should trademark the Empowerment Contract — I think it's really important. And by the way, it's not that complicated. It is, however, the work that most managers skip — because saying the word feels like trust, but they're not the same thing. Hit us with condition one.

SCOTT: Condition one: outcome clarity. What does good look like?

Most of the time, what managers give their teams is a destination without a definition of what arrival looks like. "Redesign the onboarding program." It's a destination. But how are we going to know how well that worked? What does good look like at 30 days? At 90? At a year?

In the case you described, you named the outcomes before the work started: speed to productivity, a genuine "I'm glad I joined" feeling, compliance. Three measurable outcomes. You were defining what good looked like. And that's more specific than a lot of teams ever get.

It's one of the reasons Mara was able to deliver in three weeks without a lot of oversight. She wasn't guessing what done looked like. She knew, because you had described the outcomes. That gave her clarity — and, I think this is important — it gave her permission to decide on methodology without checking in. The destination was fixed, but the route was hers.

JACKSON: And here's what that clarity actually unlocks. When the outcome is defined and agreed on, every methodology question the team faces becomes answerable without the manager. "Should we sequence compliance first or speed first?" Well, which gets us to the three outcomes faster? The team can reason their way to the right answer without looping anyone else in. Without that clarity, the team's not working without direction — but they are working without a decision framework. And every choice has to come back to the manager because there's no other way to check it.

SCOTT: Which is exactly why Dana's manager kept getting pulled in — because there weren't any named outcomes. Every time the manager reviewed the work, she was measuring it against a picture Dana had never seen. The corrections felt arbitrary, because they were arbitrary in the only way that mattered: Dana didn't have a way to anticipate them.

JACKSON: And Scott, I think that brings us to number two: boundary conditions. The honest answer to the question — where are the walls in the sandbox? Not preferences. Not suggestions. Literally: where are the walls?

With Mara, I named them before she started. No spending over $5,000 without a conversation. No asking another function to change their process without looping me in. No commitments we couldn't walk back. Those are the three things that required me. Everything else was hers.

Now compare that to Dana's situation. Twelve weeks, no named boundaries. The manager had walls — real ones — but she never shared them. They were never described. So every time Dana hit one, it felt like a surprise to her and a correction from the manager.

By week eight, Dana stopped making decisions. She was guessing at invisible lines, hoping not to cross them.

The way I think about boundary conditions: you've got to name the three things. The non-negotiables — compliance requirements, budget caps, dependencies that affect other functions. The things that require a conversation before the team proceeds. And then you've got to give the team the ability to manage through their own complexity without checking in. If you can't articulate those walls, honestly, you're not ready to start the work.

SCOTT: I want to give you a friendly correction, but only because I know you well enough to say it. You don't let people fail. What you do is craft the boundary conditions — because outside those walls is failure. The creative space inside? That's theirs. When people come back and haven't been creative enough, I've watched you push them back in and say, "I don't think this is your best work." But you're not stepping over them to give them the answer. You're saying: go back and fix it. That's where the growth happens.

The real failure is when you don't define the walls and they stray outside them. You don't do that.

And one thing I've watched you be really good at is naming exactly when to come to you. A lot of managers are tempted to keep things vague: "Use your judgment. Check with me if it feels big." That is not a framework. That is anxiety with a nice tone. The team needs to know — before the project starts — the specific kinds of decisions they get to make on their own, even if you may not agree with every aspect. They also need to know the ones that are emphatic: those need a conversation. Frame it without flinching. The moment you leave a category vague, you create a Dana situation with really good intentions.

JACKSON: It's also worth saying the boundary conditions don't have to be comprehensive. They just have to be honest. Three, four, five real constraints, clearly named, are worth way more than a ten-page delegation framework that no one will ever read or remember. The goal isn't to cover every scenario — that's impossible. The goal is to give the team a principled basis for deciding which scenarios require you.

Scott, why don't you take number three — decision rights?

SCOTT: Decision rights is one of the most important questions a team member is going to have — especially the ones who want to take initiative, who want to explore, who want to be creative. They want to know: what is it that I can decide on my own? Not in theory, but in practice for this project this week.

The framework you described is genuinely useful. Check with me on anything that's an irreversible commitment. If you're going to do that, let's have a conversation — I'm not necessarily going to give you the answer, but we need to talk. It's honest. And honesty beats comprehensive every time. A team member can actually hold it in their head. They can use it at nine o'clock on a Tuesday morning when they're staring at a boundary condition.

JACKSON: And what I noticed with Mara is that the decision rights framework freed her from a very specific kind of exhaustion — the exhaustion of constantly wondering: is this one of the decisions I need to loop Jackson in on? When that question has a clear answer, the energy that used to go toward managing that uncertainty, or managing the manager, goes directly into the work. She was faster, not because she had extra capacity, but because she didn't have that extra weight of second-guessing every call.

SCOTT: There's a signal value here that I think gets missed. When you give somebody a decision rights framework before the work starts, you're communicating something about who they are in the project. You're saying: I've thought through where your authority begins and where mine as the manager ends. I've done the work on my end. I'm asking you to own this — not to perform ownership. That changes how people show up.

Dana never got that signal. What she had was an enthusiastic manager at the start, and a slow erosion of confidence every time an invisible line got crossed.

JACKSON: And here's what changes when all three conditions are in place. The team stops managing the manager. They start managing the work. That's exactly what happened with Mara. Because she knew from day one: here are the outcomes, this is your sandbox, these are the three types of decisions that need me, and everything else is yours.

And I do appreciate you saying I don't let people fail — but I kind of do. There are times where you look at a situation and say, somewhat, "I would not make that decision based on my experience." But they haven't had that experience yet. And it's not going to be catastrophic. So I will point and say, "Have you considered the implication of this?" And if they say yes, I'll let them go do it. Because then they'll realize they didn't really consider it. And next time they'll say, "Oh — is that what you were trying to get me to think through?" And I'm like, yeah.

That failure point is really important. Because it allows her to present in front of the management team with no anxiety. Didn't need me to validate a single slide. That is ultimately what the prep work buys you. It's defined in speed.

SCOTT: I'm going to push you again on this, because I think there's a nugget here. You're not really letting them fail. What you did was craft the boundary conditions — because outside of those is failure. What you're saying is: I wouldn't have made that decision, and you did, and you stayed within the lines. And if they ultimately have to walk it back, that's where the learning happens. The failure would have been if you didn't define the boundary conditions. Maybe that's semantics. But the key point is: you did the hard work up front, and that's what leads to greater success.

So the real question is: are you willing to do the prep work as a manager before you use a word like empowerment? Most managers skip it — not because they're lazy, but because doing that prep work forces a conversation that most of us would find easier to avoid. Which is: where does my authority end? Where does that person's authority begin? It's a vulnerable conversation. It requires a manager to name their own limits. And naming limits feels like losing control — when it's actually the only thing that creates it.

JACKSON: True. And at some point, you can't scale if you're in the middle of everything. It is a force multiplier going forward.

Let's transition to what a CHRO can do starting this week. First one — you'll love this, Scott — it's an audit.

Pick a project in the last 30 days where you thought you had empowerment in play. Write down the three outcomes, the boundary conditions, and the decision rights as you understand them. You can be the manager or the team — probably easier if you're the manager. Then ask the team to do the same exercise independently, and compare the two. The gaps between them are exactly what you owe the team before the next sprint begins.

SCOTT: We're talking about this in a project-based sense, but this also applies to how people operate in their actual roles day to day.

Next step: before you kick off the next project, run the boundary conditions conversation. Don't add it to the agenda. Schedule a separate 45-minute session where the explicit agenda item is: here's where I'm going to keep my hands in my pockets, and here's where I'm going to take them out and help. Here's where I'm going to walk in, and here's where it's yours. Name the non-negotiables. Name the things that need a conversation. Name the things that are fully delegated. Put it in writing. Not as a bureaucratic artifact — there's something about writing it down that makes it real. It becomes a living reference document the team can actually use.

JACKSON: Yeah. And if you walk into a piece of work and change something, say out loud what you're doing and why: "I'm overriding your sequencing decision because of a dependency with Finance that I should have named before we started. That's on me, not you. Here's the constraint."

That doesn't make the override comfortable, but it keeps the trust account from getting overdrawn. The team can tolerate a correction they understand — especially if you take the blame. They can't tolerate a correction that feels arbitrary. That's how you lose the trust.

SCOTT: I think you just named the most important one. Because it not only helps the team in the way you described — it helps you as the manager recognize where your thinking was incomplete. You can then correct that for the next time you run the playbook.

Here's a fourth one: have the debrief you've been skipping. If you've overridden a team in the last 90 days without a direct conversation about what it meant for their authority or ability to act independently, schedule that conversation this week. Not to relitigate it — but to repair the contract. Most managers skip it because it feels awkward. But leaving it unaddressed doesn't make the trust damage go away. It pushes the next project to start from a deficit.

JACKSON: That last one's the uncomfortable one for me. Going back and naming an override you already made, then owning the cost it had on someone's confidence — that's genuinely hard. Most leaders don't do it. But if you're sitting on a team that's gone quiet, that escalates everything, that checks in before making even the smallest move — there's a good chance you're already living in the aftermath of a Dana situation. In that case, the conversation isn't optional. It is the work you need to do now.

And with that, let me pivot into the best part of the entire show.

Alrighty, senior leaders, here is your Talent Sherpa summary. Or, as Scott always says: "Empowerment is just an organizational redesign that hasn't admitted what it is yet."

SCOTT: I don't think I've ever said that.

But here is the summary.

One: empowerment is not a declaration, it's a design. The word means nothing without the three conditions that make it real.

Two: outcome clarity is the starting point, not the finish line. You also need boundary conditions and decision rights, or the team is flying a plane without instruments. And having done that — it's not fun.

Three: when you override a team you said you trusted, you're not only changing a deliverable. You're teaching them something. And what you're teaching them is that their authority was provisional — and that you didn't really mean what you said about empowerment. Provisional authority is not authority.

Four: the manager who skips the prep work doesn't end up with an empowered team. They end up with a bottleneck caused by their own actions. They own every decision they were trying to delegate.

JACKSON: The takeaway for me is this. I spent years thinking empowerment was about trust — believing in people enough to let them run. And to be fair, it probably is. But trust isn't enough without the structure underneath. Trust without outcome clarity is hope. Trust without boundary conditions is a setup. Trust without decision rights is this nice thing you said before you walked in and changed everything.

So you've got to do the work before you say the word. And if you already said it without doing the work, go back and do it now. Because the team's still waiting — and they're guessing at what they've been empowered to do, what they actually own, and what they actually get to decide.

That's it for today. I want to say thank you so much for tuning into the Talent Sherpa Podcast — this is where senior leaders come to rethink how human capital really works.

Scott, this is so much fun to do with you. I'm just having the time of my life.

I want to give a quick shout-out to one of our favorite listeners: hello, Christine in Atlanta. Thank you for being part of the Talent Sherpa community.

And we thank everyone for listening — whether you're in Santa Ana, California, or in Helsinki, Finland, where incidentally they have amazing gluten-free cinnamon rolls right there on the docks. It's really great to have you with us. Maybe we need to go have a live session in Helsinki so I can get more of those cinnamon rolls. Literally the best I've ever had in my life.

SCOTT: I like that idea. If you liked today's episode, do us a favor — take a second right now and hit the like button. Or better yet, subscribe to the podcast and leave us a review on your favorite platform — whether that's Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. We're on all of them. It would really benefit the community if you take a moment and leave a review. Those reviews trigger the algorithm. The algorithm helps spread the content. And that's what helps senior leaders. It's free, it'll be really helpful to us, and potentially helpful to somebody else.

JACKSON: And if you're a CHRO wondering where to start your AI journey, don't forget to check out the cleverly named Propulsion AI at getpropulsion.ai. They're building a team of AI teammates to help human capital leaders focus on what matters to the business. Scott, can you tell us a little bit about what you help people with?

SCOTT: Not only what you just said, Jackson, but our AI teammates coach managers to create clarity and help them achieve better outcomes. They work directly with managers and alongside their human colleagues.

And don't forget — if you're an early-stage CHRO, Jackson's helped a lot of people exactly like you through personal coaching, through the very new CHRO Ascent Academy, and through his best-selling Substack. You can find all of those at www.mytalentsherpa.com.

JACKSON: Thanks, Scott, and thank you to everyone who is listening. Until next time — keep raising the bar. Do the work before you say the word. And keep on climbing.