How leaders can build an empowerment culture

Empowerment is a popular topic in leadership and team effectiveness and the conversation often feels like a push and pull where a team member asked to be more empowered, and the leader is confused because they feel they are already empowering their teams.  So, what is it and how can you leverage it to create an effective team culture? Empowerment is authority or power given to someone to do something. At its simplest, empowerment is used to help someone become stronger, confident, and more successful.  It’s an essential leadership element.

Creating the conditions for empowerment has three cornerstones.  To be empowered, the first cornerstone is to “Be Allowed” - you must be allowed by being given the budget or money and agreed tasks, goals, strategy, and role authority.  The second cornerstone is you must “Be Able” - you are competent with the necessary skills, have the knowledge and access to necessary systems and processes, and you know your own limitations.  And the third cornerstone is “Want” – you need to be able to trust that you can be empowered and are aligned with purpose, values, and commitment. You have to want to be empowered and trust that you can be. In taking something on you are vulnerable and taking a risk to grow and learn, but also risk failure.

There are five elements that you can work on to create the conditions for empowerment culture.  They are context, commitments, challenge, coaching, and conversations:

Context

Clarity of purpose includes setting the context of why along with the values and norms necessary. Using a model such as Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle ensures you and your team are clear on where you’re going, what success looks like, and the shared values and norms for how you want to get there.  It’s important that you help your team be clear on how their efforts contribute to the overall vision.

Commitments

Agree on how to make and keep commitments. Talk about making requests and how “no” and counteroffers are essential to empowerment and commitments. Once commitments are made, be clear on how to communicate milestones, when things change, roadblocks and completion. Creating clarity on the norms of commitments allows you both to trust in taking risks together.

Challenge

Challenge your team members by offering them challenging projects and delegate stretch assignments.  Give them more autonomy to make decisions and decide how they do their work. Be mindful to make a conscious assessment of where a team member is at in their competencies and stretch but not overwhelm. 

Coaching

Instead of quickly solving problems, practice taking a coach approach to leading.  Reactively coach when a team member comes to you with a challenge or problem, try to help them solve it themselves by asking questions, encouraging them, and pushing their thinking.  Proactively coach by having conversations with team members about their strengths, goals and aspirations and explore ways you can support them in using their strengths to reach their goals. 

Conversations

Communication is essential for empowerment including feedback both reinforcing and course corrective.  It also includes keeping others informed about your progress, challenges, roadblocks and successes.  Practice showing appreciation and acknowledging their strengths and efforts in successes and even when things don’t go well.

If you want to develop stronger, more confident, and greater success with your team and team members, a culture of empowerment is key. These five elements of empowerment will provide you with the building blocks to grow empowerment with your team.