Just to compete in today’s competitive business world it’s essential to have good products, efficient operations and distribution, and a dedication to your customer. You’ll have none of these unless your company can build, release, and focus the energy and talents of people.

It’s easy for other people to copy your products, technologies, and strategies. You and your competitors constantly level the playing field. Fortunately, the one thing your competitor’s can’t replicate easily is your workforce.

Empowered employees enable you to decrease costs because you won’t need as many people to check, supervise or monitor. They will also help you to improve quality and service because high performance is built in at the source.

Your organization will be able to move much faster with empowered employees. Smart people with the authority to act solve problems and capitalize on opportunities faster. Besides, frontline staff understands products and customers as well as you.

Many senior managers secretly believe that empowerment means two things: organizational chaos and personal abdication of power. True, empowered employees make more decisions, but in expansive, successful companies, there are many more decisions to make.

Further, those who manage empowered employees get much more done. They learn to move more flexibly from group to group to help solve problems, examine opportunities, and provide encouragement, or an occasional shove.

My definition of empowerment is when you create an environment in which employees at all levels feel that they have real influence over standards of quality, service, and business effectiveness within their areas of responsibility.

Here are five keys to building an empowered workforce:

1. Build the case for empowerment. It’s not enough that empowering employees is a more humane way to manage. Show everyone, especially senior management, how empowerment will lead to higher profits. List empowerment opportunities and quantify their impact.

2. Enlist the support of senior executives. Everything you do, changing systems, structure, or processes, will not work unless you have the support of the senior executives in the organization.

3. Identify and get rid systems that don’t work. Set up team to identify practices that are not working, are not needed and replace them with practices that do work.

4. Demonstrate that empowerment will work. Put teams to work on real, winnable business issues. These shouldn’t be trivial matters, but things they care about like quality or productivity.

5. Institutionalize empowerment. Cut management layers; create a small, facilitative head office; and move to a process-based structure that breaks down the old Industrial Age hierarchy.

You may harbor two misconceptions about empowerment. First, empowerment doesn’t mean giving away power and diminishing your breadth of responsibility. Managers are not less responsible for leading the organization to success. Empowerment doesn’t divide the pie into smaller pieces for all. It promotes the baking of a bigger pie that feeds everyone at your table more richly. Overall, well-managed empowerment increases the power of the organization.

Second, you may not realize your people already have power. Don’t they have the power to affect quality? To irritate or satisfy customers? To work together or to fight? Empowerment merely channels energy toward company goals.

With all that being said empowerment does have its costs. You’ll probably spend more to recruit and train good people and you’ll have to pay them more. There’s also the potential that service may be inconsistent. After all, people use their authority in different ways. Even when you consider the costs, it’s been proven over and over again by successful organizations that the more empowerment the better in all cases.

The most successful companies today set their sights high; they follow bold ideas with well focused action; they think big and act new; and they are supported by empowered and motivated employees who help them deliver ever-increasing value to customers.