There is a lot of talk these days about empowering employees to get the job done. To “empower” someone is to give or delegate power or authority to them—as in “She authorized her assistant to sign the papers”.

In the UK they tend to use the term “discretion” rather than “empowerment”. Discretion relates to individual judgment and the ability to make responsible decisions. About forty years ago Eliott Jaques came up with the concept of the Times Span of Discretion (TSD) as a way of measuring the judgment that an employee is expected to demonstrate in a particular position.

TSD is not a type or amount of discretion; it is the length of the longest task assigned to a role (e.g. 1 day, 1 month, 1 year…). For example, a manager may allow an employee a TSD of one month—in other words the employee has the discretion to make judgments about what needs to be done on tasks that last up to one month without checking in with the boss. TSD is not a metric that is used much in the US but can be a useful way of putting some definition around “empowerment” and just might be a practical way of making “empowerment” a reality in some organizations.

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