How do you empower your team to take ownership and initiative?

Before setting the goal, it's important to ensure you are correctly identifying the problem you are trying to solve. To do this effectively, teams should both collaborate and info share within, but also seek feedback from multiple stakeholders. The more you understand the issue and its context, the more targeted your goal will be.

Goals and expectations don't matter if there's no trust. Trust is the foundation of empowerment. Without it, any attempt to foster initiative will simply fall flat. Build trust within your team by being transparent, dependable, and fair. If you show that you're willing to trust your team members with responsibility, they will definitely be more likely to take ownership.

SMART goals are an incredible way to create goals that are clear. Clear goals ensure that you set yourself up for success and it's not just a pipedream. You have a plan and that's the first step to make your dreams come true.

This is one of the most important things a leader can do for their team. Everyone wants to feel valued and that their voice is heard. Leaders that empower their team members to think and voice their opinions and ideas tend to have a much stronger team. The team must feel as though you are giving them the proverbial "enough rope to hang themself." As they prove that they can handle the additional responsibilities and tasks, give them more. Employees that feel valued, stay and become successful.

This is especially important when you are promoted, and are now managing former peers. Promote yourself, which means that you shouldn't do the things you used to do, because your job is to support your team, fly air cover, remove obstacles, champion their successes, and take responsibility when things go awry.

Delegation is essential to maximizing your impact as a leader. The two key actions to ensure you are successfully delegating are to (1) be clear in what outcomes would equate to success and (2) identify the level of decision making someone has. Do you want them to review and report? Propose? Act, and send an FYI later? Everyone wants to feel successful and your communication is critical to ensuring folks are set up for success.

Giving and asking for feedback consistently is a key in building a culture of feedback, and managers should actively build in spaces for this to happen. I've also found using the Situation-Behavior-Impact model of feedback (identify the situation, name the behavior, explain the impact) to also be effective in depersonalizing feedback and helps the conversation to stay focused on outcomes.

When sending a victory lap email, give kudos to everyone else. Take no credit for yourself. When you take credit for others' work, they will immediately be alienated.

The best risk management tool is giving people a voice. If everyone is empowered to give their opinion, ask questions, and bring their knowledge and experience, the diversity of thought and brain power will help prevent mishaps.

An employee on the line who gets promoted needs to mentally "promote themselves." They need to stop doing the things they used to do, empower the team to figure out new ways to be better, and most importantly, be transparent. I made the team and individual goals completely open. This fostered an inclusive team environment, where everyone was invested in the success of their team.

Sometimes you may not have time to fully talk through feedback with a direct report in the moment. Use it as an opportunity to help them take ownership, and commit to supporting them. For example, if an employee gave a presentation that didn’t go well because their slides were too wordy, let them know right after, “That could have gone better - the group seemed to be more focused on reading than focusing on you. But why don’t you talk to others on the team or research ways to make presentations more engaging and re-work a couple slides, and we can go through them in our next 1:1?” This let’s them figure out how to tackle it, while reconvening with you to ensure they’re on the right track.