How can you empower your team to take risks?

?? How can you empower your team to take risks? It all starts with creating psychological safety. 1) Open Communication - Invite diverse views and perspectives, ensuring people feel safe to speak up. 2) Process over Person - Encourage reflection on why the process didn't work versus placing focus on the person. 3) Lead by Example - Acknowledge your own mistakes and encourage others to provide alternate ideas that challenge yours. 4) Rewards - Instill confidence. Reward risk taking that is within your organization's risk appetite. Don't just reward successes. Acknowledge and celebrate those who took the risk to attempt something even if it didn't achieve the desired result. Remember to empower & enable! #leadership #empowerment

Take the risk yourself. I hear a lot about providing a clear direction but isn’t now more about empowering people to find the directions because those are changing. Shouldn’t we empower people to actually take the risk and search for the directions themselves. This is a true risk taking allowing other people to make mistakes. There is not wrong thing only a lessons learned - easy said and we all knowing it but truly doing it is taking the risk and consequences of whatever will be the outcome. And let them handle consequences it is not a leader role to take this away, but to accept it and be ok with it. Take a risk of it. In short changing mindset is more important than learning about mindset :)

Expect mistakes and surprise wins! By giving your team leeway, you may be surprised at the ideas they come up with that you might not have thought of. In the same way, if the ideas don't turn our well, you can't be punitive. Use this as a learning opportunity to understand their thinking and improve the results. Your job as a leader is to enable your people to grow and remove any obstacles that may stand in their way.

Create psychological safety. A key way to do that is by cultivating high quality connections between leaders and teams. Team members need to know that even when things don't work out, they won't look bad or suffer bad professional or personal consequences (i.e. embarrassment). That means leaders need to be very intentional about praising effort, rather than only success. Using incentives to drive success is not only ineffective, but it sets up an environment that undermines risk-taking.

Psychological safety is critical, and that requires relational investment. Empathy, consideration, and support go a long way here.

Try to appreciate effort, not success. Research shows that celebrating outcomes can undermine intrinsic motivation for the process.

Diversity can increase conflict, so shape a culture in which disagreement takes on a positive and constructive meaning. Make it safe, expected, and even admirable to conflict constructively to find innovative solutions.

Social psychology research has shown that modelling is a very powerful form of learning for human beings. If we as leaders are willing to take risks, try new things, look to face challenges head on, our team will feel less afraid to do the same. Simultaneously, it's key to ensure that your team understands the concept of failing forward, so that failure turns into a learning lesson that can foster growth and development.

Practice what I call healthy leadership - put your staff first. Be there for them. Be kind. Be admirable. That creates the kind of positive environment where team members are engaged, motivated, and safe enough to take risks. Connecting with the values and strengths of the team members is where the magic happens.