Give up control
First step to empowering your employees is to delegate and give up your control. This can be a tough task for some leaders. The actual thought of allowing your staff to make decisions on their own without your input, how scary! You need to trust your employees. After all, you hired them to do a specific job, so give them the reigns to do it.
By trusting your employees, your team gets stronger and more respectful of your leadership. Think of your team like children, for example. If you are always tying their shoes and dressing them every day, they would never learn how to do it for themselves. The same goes with teams of people. Let them figure it out and learn from mistakes. Build a culture in the workplace where it’s ok to fail. Through failure comes knowledge.
Putting trust in others, gives yourself time to be available for other responsibilities. This is also a more productive use of your team’s time when they don’t have to wait on you for all the decisions.
This also means your team has grown enough to fend for themselves (so to speak). They can make things happen without you getting in the way or creating a barrier.
A few examples of empowering your team to make decisions
“Be open to collaboration. Other people’s ideas are often better than your own.” quote from Amy Poehler
Answer Questions with Questions
To start a collaborative conversation, ask a question or propose a problem to solve. Over the years, I’ve made a habit to answer questions with a question. It gives the other person a chance to really think through the answer. Even if you know the answer, let them take a shot at figuring it out.
Let’s pretend there’s been an issue during your strategy session, with a neighboring team, that your staff is dependent on for successful delivery of your product or service.
You could ask start off the collaborative session with the following questions…
- “What’s been done to date to solve this issue?”
- “Have we talked to them recently about the issue?”
- “What do you think we should do to fix this issue?”
Just have the team collaborate amongst themselves to come up with a solution. Then you could also follow up with a question that sort of has the answer within the question
Something like “Do you think if we met with them to talk it out, that might fix it?”
Click here for a YouTube short on this example.
Brainstorm to find solutions and ideas
Brainstorming is one of my favorite practices. This practice is popular because no idea is off limits. You get a wide range of thought provoking discussion. The team builds on each others ideas and if you are a creative thinker like me, you can just see the creation of something great.
Get the team together. Start the conversation with a specific topic or problem for them to solve. Let the team ask as many questions as they may have about the problem up front. This will spark their creativity and influence the collaboration.
Once they have all the details, give them 5-10 minutes to jot down their ideas on a pad of paper or post it notes (if virtual you could use zoom whiteboard feature or other collaborative tools that are available)
When complete with their ideas, populate them in a central location where everyone can see each others ideas. As the facilitator to the discussion, you will read off the ideas to entice additional dialogue from the group. If some ideas are similar, bucket them where appropriate.
Now, have your team vote on their 3 favorite ideas. They only get 3 votes. These 3 votes can be for the same idea or 3 separate ideas. Once everyone has voted, there should be a clear winner for the solution/idea they think will solve the problem.
With this idea in hand, now you can let them work amongst themselves to get all the details and begin solving the issue. This exercise gives you buy-in from the team. They have buy-in because they came up with the solution and they have stake in the resolution.
What does it mean to “Empower”
Empowering your employees is all about helping them grow professionally and personally. Building their confidence and trusting them to make decisions.
Here’s a 4 minute YouTube on Rethinking Employee Empowerment and Loyalty. It really speaks to the importance of pushing authority down to all levels
Remember, your employees still need you. They need you in a different ways.
- You need to guide and inspire them
- You need to be a coach and a mentor
- You need to remove barriers for them
- You need to provide them with opportunities to learn and grow
- You need to listen and know when to offer a helping hand
- You need to trust them and grant authority to make decisions
By empowering your employees, you are creating opportunities for your business to flourish.
Check out my YouTube short on Leadership. This displays what a true leader is all about.
