Empowering Your Team To Lead & Succeed

Here we will look at the strategies that you can implement to best support your teams to take initiative in leading, and how this constitutes success.

We will explain the significance of team communication, support, and recognising your employees and their original ideas, whilst facilitating a positive work environment. 

Keep reading to understand this by looking at key statistics to demonstrate the significance of empowerment.

Communicating with your Employees

According to Infoprolearner ‘83% of employers state it’s crucial to develop leaders at all levels’. By developing communication strategies between your employees, you will certainly make leading more successful and consequently better. This can be observed by truly communicating, by understanding what other employees need in order to support their growth.

This facilitates success because this means that it can prevent any potential problems for the business as a whole for the future. This makes your employees empowered to lead more successfully as it allows them to look beyond themselves and instead at a whole team, promoting relationships as well. It also acts as a method in ensuring that your employees feel understood, increasing the positivity of the work environment, a point which will be explored later in this article. 

Since long before the pandemic, we've held Monday morning all-hands meetings. We discuss all the key business decisions, update everyone on projects across teams and I personally deliver my sales pipeline so the team understand the exciting projects coming in. We openly discuss any problems or struggles which can be improved and share ideas to support each other. More recently these have taken place via Zoom with the team - but the importance is the same.

Keeping Teamwork in Mind

Making people feel a part of a team is a great strategy to implement in empowering your teams to lead and support future success. Builtin says how ‘79% of employees quit their jobs due to lack of appreciation’. This demonstrates the significance of empowering people in their jobs, and teamwork is a great way to do this, as this allows people to look towards a common goal, understanding how their contributions support the bigger picture.

This allows the empowerment of teams to lead significantly, as it allows them to have a directive to work towards, and thus infuses them with ideas on how to best support a team of people. In this way, by having a long-term goal via clear communication, leaders are able to become empowered by directing this team effort, allowing them to feel more significantly involved in company success. This is more likely to drive actual success itself.

Our team have always worked well together, our team leaders naturally support others and where they can offer guidance and support, they do. We can only achieve our business goals with teamwork and we celebrate success together.

Accepting New Ideas

When your team leaders are more open to potentially new and revolutionary ideas, this is significantly likely to improve the engagement of the team as a whole. The image below by Forbes demonstrates the significance of empowered employees. By producing an environment that allows the option to suggest ideas, you are cultivating a positive work environment in which your employees are likely to feel more comfortable in. This will empower them to speak up on things that they believe can grow the company or support more long-term goals.

Empowerment also comes by the manager recognising the value of these ideas, as well producing the necessary environment for them to be introduced in the first place. It is crucial to acknowledge your employees’ ideas, and discuss these with them, recognising their potential contribution towards the team, once again, reintroducing us to the argument above concerning the significance of individual employees feeling a part of the bigger picture. 

These ideas can be directed towards short-term or long-term goals, and equal significance must be placed on each strategy, as they are essentially working above and beyond to support the goals for your business. Such significant initiative must be acknowledged and subsequently rewarded, and we will explain the significance of rewarding employees in our next point on the importance of rewarding hard work and commitment to your business.

Rewarding Hard Work

If we look Figure 1 above once again, we can really see the correlation between employee empowerment and employee engagement. Such successes can also be achieved by rewarding your employees to encourage momentum in the business, and this is a great way that you can empower your team to lead and take directive in operations that will support your goals as a business.

This can be done in the form of offering holiday opportunities, or by hosting monthly awards for specific categories in which certain employees have been successful. For example, if you are a business who thrives on customer service, it might be worth getting a reward for someone who has achieved the best feedback from customers. The presence of this potential alone will empower your employees to lead, as this will increase morale, and allow people to strive towards success by feeling such appreciation as a part of a larger picture.

Each week 123 Internet Group host our weekly game show where we offer the chance for all team members to nominate a key team member who they felt exceeded expectations or supported them during that week. We spin a wheel and the winner gets to either choose a prize from a sealed envelope (selected randomly by everyone each year) or swap for the mystery box - which only I have control over!

This might sound like a waste of time and money, but it's been one of the best kept secrets for our business during the pandemic. It brings everyone together, gives us the lift and fun before the weekend and celebrates the success for everyone that week!

Encouraging Positivity

Whilst it is necessary to critique employees in meetings in order to ensure growth, it is just as important to encourage them by recognising their successes as well. According to Forbes ‘70% of employees in the US are unhappy in their jobs due to negative management’. This demonstrates the potential detrimental impact when negativity is overemphasised, as this will certainly disempower team members to strive towards success, as they are unhappy in their jobs. This is proof that empowering them to lead is crucial.

This can be done by reducing the presence of significant conflicts in the work environment which are likely to be eased by level-headed discussion, and instead, placing a larger focus on what is going right when an employee is feeling undervalued. This supports the argument for investing time into your employees, as they are the backbone of your company. Thus, changing the way that your employees work and the environment that they work in will empower them to make more significant contributions than those who feel undervalued at the hands of your business.

Therefore, in order to empower your team to lead and succeed it is crucial to clearly communicate with each other to understand what is currently successful, and what can be improved upon. Empowerment comes from the encouragement of your employees’ ideas and encouraging the positive aspects of your employee’s contributions, and these can be recognised by implementing reward systems, increasing morale, and thus successful leadership in your team.

Scott Jones is the CEO of 123 Internet Group, a full service digital marketing agency with a head office in Milton Keynes and further locations in Northampton and London we support a national audience with web design and development, search engine marketing, social media management, hosting and email services.

For more information about our services or advice on how to improve your online marketing activities please reach out and connect with us via our website or our social media channels.