Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, "Happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort." There is a lot of wisdom in this statement, and I believe that every one of us can testify that this is a very true statement. Nothing feels as good as creating and accomplishing something new.

I've already used Jesus' Parable of the Talents to discuss reinforcement and consequences, but this time I'd like to use the same parable to discuss empowerment and creativity. In the previous post, I described how the "boss" responded when he returned, and how handled each of the situations based on the results that were produced. However, before anyone could have produced any results, they first had to be given the opportunity to produce those results. Let's take a closer look at how this whole thing got started:

For it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted to them his property. To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away.

Matthew 25:14-15

The first thing that I want to draw your attention to is the fact that this man was a wealthy man. While we cannot be sure of the exact value of the "talent", many scholars believe that one talent is likely worth several years of income for the average worker. So to give one man 5 talents would be like giving him several hundred-thousand dollars. Therefore it is probably a safe assumption that he was a very successful business man, and worked hard for the money that he had. In fact, one of the servants even makes the comment that he knew that the master was a shrewd business man (v. 24). My point here is that this was a for-profit kind of guy, who likely lived a life centered around making money, and he was obviously very good at it.

So now he needs to leave for a while, so he evaluates what his servants are capable of, and distributes money to them commensurate with their abilities. One important thing to note here is that he knew exactly what each of his servants were capable of doing. This does not sound to me like he only had a passing relationship with each of them. He must have known each of these servants really well in order to trust each of them with such large amounts of money.

The next important thing to notice about this is simply the fact that he gave them to money to work. Literally, he gave them responsibility. What I find interesting here though is that it never states anywhere that he told any of them what they were supposed to do with the responsibility, but rather he simply gave them responsibility and left it up to them to determine what to do with it. You may also notice that immediately after he gave each of them their responsibility, he them immediately went away. Again, no sticking around to coach them in what they were supposed to do.

The good ones knew the "purpose of the organization" and went out and made things happen. The poor one never did make the connection between the goals of the organization and his own obligations to help meet those goals, and he paid dearly for it. However, each of the first two DOUBLED their money with little to no direction on how to do it.

I believe that this speaks very loudly about the connection between empowerment and creativity. Once the servants were given the responsibility over a piece of "the company", they became successful by coming up with their own plans for how to work the money. Not only was the boss happy about what they did, but imagine how awesome you would feel if you were given a responsibility, and found ways on your own to succeed with it. It is easy for me to imagine that these servants were successful because they (1) had a strong example to follow, (2) were empowered to handle the responsibility on their own, and (3) were given the opportunity to come up with their own ideas on how to be successful.

So my questions to you on this one are simple. How can you be sure how much ability each member of your team has in order to take on new responsibilities? Then, how can you empower the people on your team, and position them to achieve their own greatness? And finally, what can you do to support their journey to the next level?

You see, people are often afraid to truly empower people because they might end up being better than themselves and end up taking over. However, if you think about the business man in this parable, he is successful because his "employees" were successful.