The tweezers feel like lead in my hand, 15 grams of stainless steel that might as well be a 55-pound sledgehammer today. I’m staring at a movement-a delicate, 235-part clockwork heart-but my left eye has been doing this rhythmic jumping thing for the last 45 minutes. I made the mistake of Googling it during my break. Apparently, I’m either slightly dehydrated or I’ve developed a specific neurological glitch that only affects people who spend 35 years staring through a loupe. Hans J.P. always told me that the hands are just messengers for the brain, and right now, my messengers are sending a lot of very loud, very confused telegrams. Hans J.P. has been a movement assembler for 45 years, and he’s the only person I know who can hold a breath for 65 seconds while setting a balance wheel. He has this way of looking at a watch-not as a machine, but as a series of promises. If the gear doesn’t turn, the promise is broken.

I’m thinking about promises because of Sarah. Last week, I sat in the 15th-floor conference room and watched our Director of Operations stand up, adjust his 125-dollar silk tie, and announce to 25 stunned people that he was ’empowering’ Sarah to take full control of the customer retention initiative. He used the word ’empower’ 15 times in 5 minutes. He made it sound like he was handing her a scepter and a crown. Everyone clapped. Sarah, poor Sarah, looked like she’d just been told she was responsible for stopping a tidal wave with a 5-cent plastic bucket. She’s 25 years old, she’s brilliant, and she’s been with the company for exactly 35 weeks.

The Euphemism of Authority

By Tuesday, the ’empowerment’ revealed its true face. Sarah tried to authorize a 15-dollar refund for a loyal customer who had been billed 5 times for the same service. She found out she needed 5 levels of digital approval to move a single cent. She was empowered to ‘lead,’ but she wasn’t authorized to spend 5 dollars of the department budget without a 45-minute meeting. This is the great corporate lie of the modern era. We’ve turned a beautiful concept-giving people the agency to make decisions-into a cost-saving euphemism for neglect. We give people the responsibility to fix problems, but we withhold the tools, the money, and the authority to actually do it. It’s like Hans J.P. asking me to assemble a tourbillon while he locks the 5 drawers where I keep my specialized screwdrivers.

I’ve seen this happen 65 times in my career. A manager wants to look progressive and ‘flat’ in their organizational structure, so they remove the guardrails but leave the handcuffs on. They want the results of a high-agency environment without the perceived ‘loss of control’ that comes with actually letting someone else hold the steering wheel. It creates a psychological state that researchers call learned helplessness, but in the office, we just call it ‘burnout.’

The System’s Toll

I’ve been feeling that burnout in my own joints lately. Every time I pick up a 15-millimeter screw, my wrist throb reminds me that I’ve been ignoring my own physical signals for 5 years. I think that’s why I was looking into things like White Rock Naturopathic the other day. When you realize that the ’empowerment’ you’ve been given to manage your own health is actually just a lack of support from a system that only cares if you show up for your 45-hour work week, you start looking for someone who actually treats the whole mechanism. You can’t just oil one gear and expect the 375 other parts to stop grinding.

That gap-that 75 percent delta between what we are asked to do and what we are allowed to do-is where all the stress lives. It’s where the eye twitches and the 5 a.m. insomnia come from. We are living in the gap.

Constraints vs. Bureaucracy

If you give me the responsibility to ensure this watch keeps time to within 5 seconds a day, you have to give me the authority to reject a faulty part. You have to give me the 5 minutes of silence I need to focus. If you don’t, you aren’t empowering me; you’re just setting me up to be the scapegoat when the watch stops ticking at 5:45 in the afternoon.

Sarah’s retention project is already failing, and it’s only been 15 days. She’s spent 85 percent of her time writing reports explaining why she can’t get anything done. Her manager is already distancing himself, saying things like, ‘Well, I gave her the lead, it’s up to her to make it work.’ It’s a cowardly dance. It’s a way to avoid the hard work of mentorship and the financial risk of delegating real power. In many ways, ’empowerment’ has become the ultimate ‘yes-and’ of corporate gaslighting. ‘Yes, you are the boss of this project, AND you have no budget.’ It’s an aikido move where the company uses your own ambition to throw you onto the floor.

We see this in the data, too. In a survey of 125 mid-level managers, 95 of them said they felt they had the responsibility for their team’s output but only 15 percent felt they had the actual authority to change the processes that were causing delays. That gap-that 75 percent delta between what we are asked to do and what we are allowed to do-is where all the stress lives. It’s where the eye twitches and the 5 a.m. insomnia come from. We are living in the gap.

I’m looking at the 5 tiny gears on my bench right now. If I put them together without the proper bridge, they’ll just fly apart the moment the mainspring releases its energy. A watch movement requires constraints just as much as it requires movement. But those constraints have to be functional, not bureaucratic. In a company, a constraint should be a ‘budget of 55,000 dollars’ or a ‘deadline of 25 days.’ A bureaucratic constraint is ‘you must ask three people who don’t understand your job for permission to do your job.’

I think I’ve realized that my own eye twitch is a reaction to the 5 different ’empowered’ committees I’ve been assigned to lately. None of them have the power to actually change the workflow, but all of them require 45-page slide decks every month. It’s a waste of the 35 years of expertise I have in this craft. We are being managed to death by people who are afraid to lead, and we are being ’empowered’ to death by people who are afraid to trust.

If we actually wanted to empower Sarah, we would have given her a 15,000-dollar discretionary fund and the ability to fire the 5 worst-performing vendors without asking for permission. We would have told her that she owns the outcome AND the process. But that would require the Director to actually give something up. It would require him to admit that he doesn’t need to be the smartest person in every room. And in a world where your 125-dollar tie is a symbol of how many people you control, giving up control feels like a small death.

So we stick to the script. We use the 15-letter words because they sound better than the truth. We pretend that we are building a culture of ‘ownership’ while we are actually building a culture of ‘blame-shifting.’ I see it in the way Hans J.P. looks at the new apprentices. He tries to tell them the truth, but they are already enamored with the titles. They want to be ‘Chief Movement Coordinators’ before they can even set a 5-second beat error. They don’t realize that the title is just a tether.

Hans J.P. is watching me. He knows. He’s known for 45 years. He just nodded once and went back to his own 255-part masterpiece. He doesn’t need a title to know he’s the one in charge of the time. He just needs his tools, his light, and the 5 grams of pressure it takes to set the world in motion. If we want a world that works, we have to stop giving people the burden of the result without the freedom of the work. Is that really so much to ask for in a 45-hour work week?

I’m going to put my tweezers down now. My eye is still twitching, and I think I need more than a 5-minute break. I need to stop Googling symptoms and start looking at the systems I’ve allowed myself to be ’empowered’ by.