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“The Empowerment Institute enabled me to transform my vision of creating empowering work cultures into reality. The empowerment methodology, taught and modeled with integrity by David Gershon and Gail Straub, is a powerful instrument in harnessing employee potential. In using this methodology with one organization, the General Manager said, the behavior changes she witnessed from the workshop participants were dramatic. Now she wants more!”
– Elizabeth Soltis, Organizational Development Consultant

 “The teaching of Empowerment Institute has had a tremendous impact on EVERY client contact we have. We took a hard look at how we ask questions and challenge our clients in their interviews with us. Sadly we concluded that almost all of these were focused on identifying mistakes and faults; and that in fact we were squandering highly valuable face time with clients not probing and getting them excited about the growth opportunities ahead for them. It was an easy observation after the Institute, and it changed the way we talk and work with all our clients. The empowerment methodology is making its way into every part of our business and team, and now has the full support of the leadership. It has changed the company that I helped create and made me more excited than ever to be part of it.”
– Marc de Swans Aaron, Chairman, Effective Brands

“We wanted to shift our focus as an organization away from what wasn't working to what was possible. Of course, this is exactly what the empowerment model was based on. Personally I was just crying out to hear something like this. All of us came back from the empowerment training extremely excited about how well this would translate into the work we do with people living with HIV and AIDS, and the general values we hold within the organization.

“So we started to work with the empowerment model immediately. I recall a situation where we were having some problems with a local clinic where one of my case managers was stationed. The four of us who had done the training came into my office and shut the door. What was interesting was that we started that meeting with the old way of thinking, listing all the problems we were having. We got through half a page and I said ‘wait a minute, wait a minute. We just came back from the empowerment training, we are going about this all wrong.’ We ripped it apart and said ‘let's list how we want this to be.’ And in forty minutes, literally, we had our plans on the wall. It was unbelievable to me really. It took forty minutes.”
– Diane Brown, Executive Director of the Southern Tier AIDS Program

Changing Behavior in Organizations: The Practice of Empowerment

Empowerment is the process of enabling individuals to adopt new behaviors that further their individual aspirations and those of their organizations. This article presents a behavior change model that is based on twenty-five years of research and practice. It has been applied by hundreds of change practitioners in organizations throughout the world. One feature of this model that differentiates it from many approaches to organizational change is that it focuses on both the individual and the collective enterprise. As individuals grow and achieve outcomes important to them, they also benefit the whole. At the same time, the organization serves as a resource to enable the individual to achieve these outcomes. This mutual accountability strengthens the commitment level of both the individual and the organization, enabling greater sustainability for the change initiative over the long term.

pdf Read the entire article from The Systems Thinker.

A Framework and Methodology
for Changing Behavior, Developing Talent
and Transforming a Culture

In today’s highly competitive talent marketplace, organizations that want to attract, retain and advance top talent must be skilled at developing people. And as the rate of change in the marketplace accelerates, organizations are constantly trying to help employees adopt the critical new behaviors necessary to keep pace. Over the past three decades, Empowerment Institute has developed a highly effective methodology which it calls the “empowering organization” to enable talent development, behavior change and the cultural transformation needed to further both. It has deployed this methodology in large and small organizations and trained hundreds of practitioners to deliver it.

If an organization has one or more of the symptoms of a disempowering culture, as described to the right, it will be difficult to further any change initiative. Along with the design of a talent development and behavior change strategy, the empowering organization methodology transforms these symptoms so that future change initiatives have the fertile soil needed to take root.