Team empowerment is one of the core required skills of a leader, I will share the principles I follow, and please add in the comment what works for you. There is always room to improve.
- Roles and responsibilities. Always the golden rule number 1 on performance management, conflict resolution, and team empowerment. The team will only perform well once they know the scope of their work and what they need to contribute. This can be used as baseline to identify training and hiring gaps.
- Active listening and constructive feedback. Encourage open discussions with reasoning, provide context and more information when required. Pay close attention to body language, tones, and wording. Stay at the level with the employee, keep it mutual about the ideas, and sway the conversation if it is off track. A lot of leaders have the so called open door policy, but when you actually bring on a topic, you can feel their tone and the body language are not welcoming.
- Alignment with company vision and goals. Take every opportunity to align company goals to team and individual goals, clarify any ambiguities and correct any misunderstandings, aka the why part of the what-how-when triangle. This will certainly improve the engagement from employees, as they know what they are contributing to, and what is the result of their work.
- Be trust worthy. Make sure you demonstrate in daily actions that your team can trust you through accountability, consistency, empathy, and keep integrity high.
- Trust and delegate. Provide opportunities, tools, and resources. I have seen cases where it goes wrong when responsibilities come without adequate level of authority. It is counter productive without appropriate level of authorities. As the employee won't feel they own the decisions. Focus on the end result, not execution details.
- Ask for feedback. You may have good intention and have taken actions to empower the team, but they may not feel the same way, always align with the team for their feedback, how do they feel about your initiatives and what they need from you to success.
- Provide training opportunities. Developing team's skills, knowledge, experience, and expertise. Foster a continuous learning culture and mindset. It will be a yield of high ROI, common trainings include seminars, courses, books, events, and some orgs provide partially or fully funded further educations.
- Focus on result, leave room for execution. Throw a challenge so they can think and work out of the box. Coach on how to reach a solution.
- Recognization, rewards and encouragement. Always show appreciation about the team's achievement, make sure there is a rewarding mechanism.
- It is a two way street. Empowerment requires employees to make efforts and take risks as well, make sure the team understand that despite all your efforts and actions, for them to success they need to do their parts as well. For example, proactively seeking opportunities to improve.
