How The Enabling Leader Empowers Their Team

In the knowledge-based economy at least, we are reportedly reaching a tipping point at which a new form of organisation and management structure is now taking shape.

Big name companies are moving to a model that offers more fluidity and adaptability, with trust being invested in their talent to unleash that collective passion and energy. You could say that it is now all about the team.

Sure, maintain a light framework and continue measuring performance. However, CEOs are now building company architectures, often flatter structures, that foster an even greater level of autonomy, agility and collaboration.

So, give your team a set of objectives for their project, a budget and a timeline for delivery, let them get on with it and then congratulate yourself for scoring high on the trusting leader scale. Right? If only it were that simple.

Pivoting to a more fluid, adaptable working structure with more autonomy helps you realise the powerful potential of the team dynamic, in theory. In practice, however, the leader needs to understand the subtle skills of empowerment to make it all work. How do you, the leader, transfer power to your people successfully?

The recipe for empowerment

In short, empowerment requires an environment where there is the right capability and the ingredients for enablement. You can entrust others, but more autonomy often exposes the skills gaps in your team. Some capability can be grown through learning and development. Confidence is often needed, too, for people to take the empowerment they’ve been given.

Capable people then need to be enabled. As a leader, your trick here is to create the conditions for work that make it possible for your talent to shine. So how do you become the enabling leader? Here are some of the keys to creating that culture of true empowerment

• Trust - this is the baseline. You need to build trust to achieve buy-in, so be open and transparent, honest and vulnerable if you need to be. If you are a closed book, you will find it difficult to empower your team. People also need to trust themselves to take more ownership.
• Connection - people need to feel connected to one another, to you and the business ambition. This is particularly important with hybrid working models in which employees often work remotely and thus teams fragment.
• Autonomy - have I got the autonomy to do what you say I can do? Do I feel I can safely challenge you? These are questions your people may well be asking themselves when you ‘loosen the reins’, so no more micro-managing or inconsistently ‘diving back in’ without being clear about why you are doing so.
• Purpose and context - your team needs to understand the bigger picture and where they and their projects fit in. Understanding purpose and wider context will help them help you achieve those overarching corporate goals. Everyone needs to understand the ‘why’.
• Alignment - is everyone pulling in the same direction and clear what’s expected for them? Empowerment becomes messy if your people are unclear or at odds with each other. Good, clear communication is essential to achieving alignment and to maintaining it.

There are two more ingredients that make this all work. The first is psychological safety. This is the glue that binds all of the above together, because your people need to know that they can take risks and that they can challenge your point of view. Where there is a blame culture, for example, empowerment just doesn’t work. It’s about support and stretch for success.

And the second ingredient is consequences. The onus is not entirely on you, the leader. Your people need to step up here, and that means there must be consequences – good and bad – when people step up to take ownership.

So many of the teams I work with talk about creating a culture of more empowerment but don’t really have a common view of what it means and what it takes. It isn’t a magic wand but it can absolutely drive the change you as a leader wants to see.

If we are indeed at that tipping point and the trend is towards greater autonomy, we will only empower our teams if we learn as leaders how to enable.