How to help people feel empowered to act and work autonomously: Strategy #4.1 – Provide opportunities for empowerment
We have previously published a series of practical leadership actions around the themes of people feeling supported, valued and safe; creating a ‘team environment’; supporting learning and growth; empowering staff and building autonomy; ensuring clarity of roles and expectations; and creating meaning and purpose.
We are now going to explore the actionable steps that you can take to enable the suggested strategies and actions. This is one in a series of 31 posts providing specific descriptions of the actions in practice.
So, this post focuses on the theme of helping people feel empowered to act and work autonomously. In a previous post we have talked through 5 overarching strategies to support building an environment where people feel empowered to act and work autonomously:
4.1 Provide opportunities for empowerment
4.2 Set clear boundaries
4.3 Encourage people to ‘take responsibility
4.4 Proactively manage the authorising environment
4.5 Provide coaching and support
In this post we take a deep dive into the specific strategy of:
4.1 Provide opportunities for empowerment
Actively identifying opportunities for pieces of work for which individuals or teams can be fully accountable and setting them up for success sends a clear signal that you are valuing autonomy and creating an empowered work environment.
So, here are some of the actions that can be taken to put this leadership strategy into practice:
- Identify projects, chunks of work or key processes for which they are accountable. You can demonstrate your commitment to empowerment by explicitly making people accountable for key pieces of work. Rather than merely asking someone to undertake activity or task to someone in the normal course of business, you can clearly explain to someone upfront that you want them to be fully accountable for the work – this would involve describing to them the results (outcomes/outputs) and the performance standards expected, while also expressing confidence in their ability to deliver. You would also make it clear that you would be available for support or coaching, however you will not be checking up on their work or inserting yourself into the activity. Watch people rise to the challenge!
- Provide people with choice as to how they will deliver the outcomes. Let staff tell you how they might deliver. For people to feel empowered they will need to have a sense of choice and control over their work. In briefing a staff member on a piece of work or activity the leader’s role is to clarify the ‘why’ of the work (impacts of the work, context in which it fits) and the ‘what’ of the work (what needs to be delivered, to what standard, timeframes), and any constraints (resources, budgets etc.) but not drift into describing ‘how’ the work should be done. It is appropriate to let people determine how they will go about the task – leave it up to them. They might seek your advice or input, however let them determine the approach – steps to take, stakeholders to engage, people who need to be involved etc. Try to avoid ‘sharing your brilliance’ with them!
- Share information and explain the broader context in which their project or activity fits. People need to have sufficient understanding of the context to optimise their chance of successful delivery of their project or activity. This would involve explaining how their project connects to broader organisational strategies/plans; the impacts the project/activity could have on users, clients, community, stakeholders; any organisational politics of which they might need to be aware; and factors, issues, or trends that might impact the project/activity. This will provide critical information to help them determine the ‘how’ of their approach. People are also more likely to innovate or find better ways of doing things if they have a clear understanding of the intent of key work and how it links into the broader context.
- Ensure people are set up for success – make sure they have the skills, motivation, authority and resources to deliver the outcomes. A sure recipe for setting someone up to fail is to give them a project/task for which they don’t have the skills to do, have little interest in, have no authority to make decisions relating to how they undertake the task, and insufficient resources (people and $) to deliver the outcomes/outputs. So, here is a checklist of questions to be considered when assigning a project/task: Does the person have the capabilities (or with appropriate development stretch with support)? Are they likely to be reasonably energised by the task? Do they have sufficient authority in line with the accountability they have been given? Do they have access to sufficient people and budgets to get the job done?
- Check in, don’t check up – let go and trust people to do well and don’t look over their shoulders or check up with them along the way, unless they ask. There is a fine line between ‘empowerment’ and abrogation of responsibility. Empowering someone doesn’t mean just letting people ‘sink or swim’. While empowering leaders will be keen not to micro-manage, there is still a key role to provide support and demonstrate care and interest. It can be valuable to have an upfront agreement to have a regular ‘check-in’ meeting. The staff member should lead this meeting, and it provides an opportunity for them to share progress, explore challenges, and ask for advice or support, while the leader should be in ‘how can I help’ mindset.
Having read this list, some questions you may want to ask yourself might be:
- Are there one or two ideas emerging for me that I might want to put into practice?
- What is the smallest thing I could do that might have a positive impact?
- How will I hold myself accountable for following through on my actions?
Good luck!