Down with Empowerment??

I recently had a conversation with a very successful executive who has proven herself time and time again as a competent visionary and extraordinary manager.  She made some comments regarding the language of leadership and said, "A lot of this gibberish about leadership is really a throwback to the eighties, what organizations want today are managers who can simply do the work and get things done, not just talk about it."

The statement rang true for me though, as a communicator who had for so long relied on the "language" of leadership, it left me a bit puzzled.

I had already been wrestling with the idea that many of the things we used to look to and rely upon for information and inspiration in business had become passe.  Books like the One Minute Manager, speakers like Tony Robbins, and business leaders turned authors like Jack Welch, don't enjoy the mass appeal that they once had.

I recently re-read "the Secret", a book which is so overwhelming with it's message that by some mental overhaul, you can control the outcome of thing.  Is this bad?  Have this type of communicator and author lost all of their impact?  I don't think so, but I do think that the way people think and learn is changing and the empowerment business will need to do some rethinking to retain, much less grow it's audience.

First of all, post-moderns don't want control, they want influence.  The three steps to guaranteed circumstantial change formulas are just not believable.  And if they are not believable, they are even more in-effective in causing change, and you can no longer sell them as books, seminars, or what you will.  People do however, in general believe that how they process internally and how they act will Influence circumstantial outcomes. 

The switch from having control to having influence is not only brilliant, it is believable.  People can run with it.

We will see more and more communication in this field begin to lean in this direction, however the audience will need to be won in different ways.  Words like self-improvement, steps to success, and empowerment, will need to be reforged and represented with new verb-age to keep the audience from thinking it is the same old song and dance.