5 Ways To Empower Your Team

In today’s business world, companies that have ‘the edge’ attract and retain the best talent and are the most successful. This ‘edge’ has many facets, one of which is empowering their people to have more influence over their destinies at work by giving them greater decision-making power and responsibility. We take a look into how to achieve this.

1. Meaningful work

Meaningful work and working with a purpose have become one of the most sought-after attributes of a role for both existing workers and job seekers.

Team members today are less likely to be satisfied by completing disconnected tasks in separate silos. They want a more holistic view of how they fit in within their organisation, and how they add value and help to achieve its goals and objectives.

Use one-to-ones and team meetings to emphasise individual and team contributions, and to improve understanding of how everyone's work fits in with the big picture in the company and its aims.

2. Support learning and development

Most people want to develop, so learning to help them meet their personal and professional goals is paramount. Most people are no longer content with working just for a good pay rate. 

Create a learning environment by enabling people to decide in which way they want to take their learning and allow flexibility to let them develop at the pace that most suits them.

3. Develop collaboration and decision-making

Help team members to make decisions by creating a collaborative team spirit. Be more democratic by consulting your people on decisions that affect them and giving responsibility to the team – while continuing to guide them where needed.

Leaders who put employee empowerment into the processes, systems and culture and have the confidence to distribute aspects of leadership are more likely to inspire collaboration and achieve success.

Qualities such as communication skills, emotional intelligence and influencing capability are key for leaders and teams to succeed.

4. Increase confidence - it’s OK to make mistakes

If your team is not fearful of making mistakes, it will improve innovation and creativity. By empowering people to make decisions, you should also accept that mistakes will be made.

It is important to ensure that mistakes do not become elements for blame, but rather that they become learning experiences from which individuals and the team should benefit.

Empowering teams should help to innovate more rapidly and productively. If people are afraid to make mistakes, their willingness to try new things and innovate will reduce.

5. Flatten the organisational hierarchy

Greater accountability to the team will follow a flattening of the organisational hierarchy. The days of an old-school dictatorial leader are over as business is now too complex for all leadership decisions to be made by one person.

Flattening or removing unhelpful hierarchy leads to more agile action. Distributing leadership responsibilities compliments this. However, employees generally require a lot of support for this process to be incorporated and there will always be an ongoing need for coordination of effort.

Office ce politics will need to be addressed, and rules of engagement must be simple to encourage the move from dependency on a manager to autonomous decision-making.

We hope that by adopting some of these ideas, you will attract and retain the best talent, your team will be happier and more productive and you will be more successful as an individual!