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How it feels to be disempowered

I have just been revisiting some notes from one of our echo sessions where we start by exploring the concept of ‘empowerment’ so people get a grip on why it is important to work in empowering ways and what this means in practice, it gives everyone the chance to discuss their differing views of the term and come up with ways to explain it.

One way to do this is to turn it around and ask people to think about when they have felt disempowered – what did they feel like? The results can be quite powerful and, on this occasion the group said:

Unloved, excluded, helpless, over-looked, disenfranchised, outsider, low self-worth, silenced, worthless.

They took all of these words, added a few others and turned it into a powerful piece of poetry which they then fed back to the main group to express how it feels to be disempowered:

Have you ever felt helpless, with a low self-worth,a complete outsider, overlooked and excluded?
Organisational silence – they just won’t understand
I’m left feeling under-valued, worthless and unloved
Underneath all this, I am disenfranchised
I need to be heard

What a message to people working with communities, or employing people – or just communicating with people! Of course, we would counter this by suggesting the Community Empowerment Dimensions as a framework to turn this around.

Tags: employees, managers