Many of your team members will be competent in performing their role, but how do you help them develop to take ownership of their position – delivering what they need, when they need to – and putting their own stamp on it?
These top tips can help you improve your team members’ feelings of empowerment:
- Build their confidence
Emphasise how the best ideas often come from the ‘shop floor’ – employees who are closest to the work or serving customers. Use empowering language such as compliments, recognition, and talking positively about their strengths to reinforce their confidence and self-belief.
- Agree the challenge
In ‘Play to Strengths’ we talked about how to identify each individual’s strengths and core talents. Identify where these overlap with key business priorities or areas your team needs to improve – these provide great challenges which will energise your team members and make a real difference to the business.
- Set clear expectations
Agree with each individual what you want to gain from a task or project including goals, deadlines and what the final product should look like.
- Create distance
Give team members enough space to make their own path, it’s useful to set a goal/objective, but you should trust them to deliver what you need in their own way
- Agree regular check-in points
Ensure regular check-ins are scheduled and agree how these will be done; via email, phone, video-conferencing or face-to-face; and the content you want to discuss during the meetings. Strive to provide a balance between providing challenge and support. Your aim is to ensure everything is on track but coach people to come up with their own solutions, rather than immediately offering your own.
- Review and learn
When feedback is delivered, ask your team members to share their thoughts on what went well or could go better next time. Remove the fear of failure by ensuring that when mistakes are made or tasks are not completed, the feedback given is not overly critical of the individual involved. Instead of focusing on what has gone wrong, look for opportunities to develop or improve. Failure should be seen as a learning process which can help development, and instil a sense of ownership and empowerment.