As a leader, empowerment is one of the safest bets you can make, and you have all interests to push hard on the empowerment button. Empowerment scales up capacity, broadens creativity well beyond your own limits, generates much higher level of resilience and allows to cover a much wider and deeper scope of challenges. These benefits – for you as a leader as well as for your company – are well-known and widely acknowledged.
Though as a “handshake leadership” practitioner, you’re not only interested in what empowerment brings to you as a leader, but you’re equally interested in what you thereby bring to your colleagues, and to which extent it contributes to creating a true adult-to-adult, respectful, performing and learning environment.
Foundational in empowerment is that you trust and believe that your colleagues are adult professionals who can take responsibilities successfully. By empowering, you send a strong signal of trust and belief in their own talents, and that they don’t need to be either pampered or controlled. They are peers. Once that trust is there, the magic can start.
If you doubt about your colleagues’ talent and capacities, maybe you need to look first at your own recruitment, development and feedback practices – all of which are fundamental leadership duties – as you must have as an objective to have talented people on your team.
Empowerment is not just about asking someone to do something that you could do equally well. In my experience, empowering is even more dazzling when you’re recognizing that you believe another has a better ability to take on a certain challenge than yourself. You then send both a strong message that you acknowledge your own limits, and that you are convinced that others can fare better than you in several fields. You need them. That is one of the key characteristics of performing teams: inter-dependability.
Such messages are key to craft working relationships firmly based on an adult-to-adult basis, and to move away from antiquated boss-to-subordinate relationships. Such working relationships are also foundational to a working environment that promotes diversity & inclusion, both essential pillars for collective intelligence.
Empowerment is also a great way to give interesting challenges to people as quickly and as much as possible. You thereby contribute to their quicker professional development, including their own leadership development. If you create the right context, it’s also a superb opportunity for them to learn from mistakes and to integrate that mistakes are part of their personal and professional growth. Psychological safety plays an important role here, so more on that later. You will note by the way that as a result, you create an environment where people develop faster their own leadership and talents, so you contribute actively to the development of the leaders of tomorrow.
This idea of giving people challenging assignments is also related to avoiding that talented people get bored out. Our greatest and most precious asset – for all of us – is our time and how we spend it. I hate the idea of wasting people’s time by asking them to take on assignments below their capacity. I see that personally as a lack of respect for them.
Last, empowering also means you give people the opportunity to decide, take responsibility, make mistakes, learn. They grow. The more you empower them, the faster they grow. And you’ll very quickly realize that also on strategic topics, they have will have well-informed views. The more you involved them then, the more they’ll feel part of key decision, again a strong sign of respect for their time and talent. What yesterday was a decision pushed by the boss, becomes today a collective decision supported by the team. Buy-in and involvement levels are as a result much higher. And chances of success increase as a result also.
What I find intriguing though is how many leaders seems to struggle with empowerment. They seem to look for the right balance between two extremes, ie. either a fairly controlling, task-orientated approach or what I call “blind delegation” ie. giving an assignment to someone without context, without clear expression of expectations and without space for a continuous dialogue. Actually, in my view, smart empowerment is not some midpoint between these two extremes.
Smart empowerment is a mix of context, clear expression of expectations and continuous dialogue on progress. This right mix will depend on the level of autonomy by the recipient of empowerment, as well as on the need of reassurance and desire of involvement by the giver of empowerment. That mix will not be the same for a business-critical strategic assignment as for more operational decisions. And the more empowerment works, the lighter that mix is likely to become, between the same two people, as trust increases.
Some leaders are naturally gifted to smart empower, some less. It is my belief though much can be learned, also at senior level. It’s more a matter of will and practice than skill. The joy as well as the benefits of successful empowerment are so high that my advice is: never too early to start, and never too late either.