Given all the myriad pressures on organizations, one thing is clear: Executives who "take control" and personally make all key decisions become bottlenecks. They stifle everybody else's initiative and creativity, and constrain their organizations' performance.

"As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others."

Bill Gates

To deal with the complexity and pace of today's business environment, there's only one answer: Organizations have to tap the talents of every bright mind to the fullest.

That means empowerment. But anarchy isn't an option. Work has to be coordinated.

Furthermore, controls are necessary, not because people are stupid or evil, but because organizations must ensure that their scarce resources are used for just the right things, and that staff's activities are aligned with organizational goals.

Thus, empowerment hinges on one question: What mechanisms will get everybody in the organization to work in concert to achieve shared goals?

In the past, managers played a critical role in coordinating and controlling people's work. This is precisely what put managers in the position of bottleneck.

Eliminating that management bottleneck means abandoning the management hierarchy as the primary means of coordination and control. But you can't dismantle one mechanism of coordination and control without explicitly replacing it with another.

In empowered organizations, coordination and control are not a matter of micro-managing bosses, or common high-level goals with occasional audits. Rather, they're inherent in what people must do to succeed.

Analogy: Business owners don't need to be told to please their customers, and manage staff and suppliers effectively. They do that because that's what it takes to succeed in business.

Similarly, in healthy organizations, personal success is aligned with the success of the organization.

This takes more than defining people's objectives such that they add up to the organization's objectives.

Organizations send signals that guide people day by day. In healthy organizations, those signals guide people to do what's right for the organization as a whole, just as the profit motive guides business owners to do what's right for their customers.

When the signals are well aligned, then as people look after their own success, they will automatically contribute their share to the organization's success.

And executives can stop "micro-managing," that is, directing tasks and intervening in day-to-day decisions. They won't need to. Instead, leaders can focus on where the organization needs to go (strategies) and set staff's objectives, and then the organizational signals will align people with those strategies.

Empowerment doesn't mean eliminating the organization chart, getting rid of managers, or undermining the chain of command. It means getting leaders out of the job of telling people what to do, and into the job of designing and leading organizations.

Of course, getting all the organizational signals right is not simple. It requires a thorough understanding of the systems within organizations that influence people.

That's why programming those organizational signals is a core competence of leaders.