How Successful Leaders Use Empowerment to Build Trust and Excellence

The concept of empowering the members of your team is talked about a lot these days, and with good reason.  Good leaders are characterized by their ability to empower their teams to achieve maximum success.  It is important to think through what empowerment means and how best to employ it so your organization can harness its strength.  The US Army’s definition of leadership contains implied references to empowerment: “influencing people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation, while operating to accomplish the mission and improve the organization. “ Empowerment does all of those things.  Let’s describe how it can work for you.

Defining Leadership Empowerment

Empowerment is a means to include the team in decision making, to give them a participatory role which capitalizes on their own expertise and judgment, and that increases their sense of both individual worth and commitment to the organization.   Empowerment also demonstrates that you have good listening skills, and that you care about the input of everyone on your team. When you empower your team, you motivate them to “row together”, and you increase the overall success of your mission. Empowering builds confidence in their capacity to execute your collective mission and goals, establishes essential trust in an organization, and creates the secondary level of leadership necessary when you are not present for key decisions so that the organization continues.

Empowerment sounds great, but leadership is principally about the human dimension so nothing is always simple. Embracing empowerment may run counter to the personality of some leaders. Once you are in charge of a team or an organization you may believe that your presence and your decisions alone are responsible for its success. You have worked hard and long to get to the top. You may think that your decisions to this point have made the principal difference in the success of your company. You can imagine that your individual efforts over a long time, from making comprehensive and hard hitting presentations, to writing a master plan about the future of your organization, to significantly increasing profit have been your benchmarks of personal accomplishment. Why do you need to empower your subordinates?

Empowering Team Members

The answers are clear. No one leads an organization to success on their own. It is the collective excellence of many that builds success. All of us lead based on the considerable work of everyone on the team who has labored, contributed, and committed to the same commonly stated goals. The higher you go in an organization the more you must out of necessity rely on the diverse talents and skill sets of those who make your team thrive, especially given the logarithmic rate of change in today’s global landscape. We also succeed as leaders because of the coaching, mentoring and empowerment of those whom we serve.   All of us have been empowered at some point in our leadership development by enlightened senior leaders who saw our potential to lead at their level. They gave us the opportunity to take on major responsibility, underwrote our mistakes and continued to develop us to take their place in time. So the reasons for empowering our teams begin with the understanding of the pool of collective excellence in every organization that in time empowers the mission. And we remember the trust and confidence almost all of us were given early in our own careers from leaders who saw our potential and gave us the power to fulfill that promise.

The Idea of Leadership Empowerment

Leaders who do not believe in the idea of empowerment can become isolated from their teams, and that can diminish the long term success of the organization.   They can also become micro managers who insist that only their ideas are valid, examine too critically the work of others, and make their decisions in a vacuum. They may not allow for the power of consensus and they can be averse to new ideas. The positive power of innovation and critical thinking which is often a bottom-up driven can be swept aside. This is especially true the more senior you get as a leader when your leadership skills and competence will be employed indirectly vice directly. Because of this you must rely increasingly on empowerment. Empowerment then is not a nice to have concept, it is essential to a high performing team.

Successful Organizations Empower Their Leadership

Empowerment creates a healthy, positive and ultimately successful organization – one in which there is ownership of the vision and trust in the leadership. If you are listening to your subordinates, and then acting with consideration of their thoughtful inputs, you are empowering them and your organization. If you delegate to those who work for you the authority to act on your behalf in key and well defined situations, confident that they know your vision and your intent, then you are going to stay on azimuth. And when you empower your team you are building the future leaders of your company – that bench essential to long term continuous success.

General Colin Powell writes about the idea of empowerment in his latest book, It Worked for Me.* He gives excellent examples of senior leaders who empowered junior leaders, accomplished the mission, and built far stronger teams. He also makes the point that empowerment creates trust – essential to any successful organization.

Empowering People

Empowering people is not a casual act for a leader, it must be a comprehensive and continuous process with a means to review effectiveness. How do you know that the team is doing what you need to be accomplished? How do you know they understand your intent? What if they are moving in a different direction? Good leaders – and managers – empower, but also check to make sure that empowerment is working.   President Reagan understood this well when said “Trust, but verify.” Communicate your intent, and then encourage your team to contribute with recommendations to improve the organization. Listen to them, incorporate the sound ideas, and decide on the path. When you empower your subordinates you do not give up your accountability and legal authority – that always remains with you. If one of your team members is trusted with responsibility and makes a major error, you are still the one ultimately who is held accountable.  This is one of the fundamental tenets of commanding an organization in the US Army. We are taught before we are commissioned as officers that we are responsible for everything that happens or fails to happen in our command.  The same is true in concept for leaders of companies small or large. You must keep checking to see that your team is following your intent, understands the mission, and is moving the company forward. Empowerment must be earned and demonstrated – and checked – continuously.   The means to that end can be a combination of measures of effectiveness, timelines, and listening well – never micro-managing.

In the long run empowerment should be a part of every leader’s toolkit. It strengthens everyone in the organization, it keeps the company on the path to success, and it builds one of the most important elements on any team – trust. Trust from leader to led, and trust between everyone on the team. Empowerment invests in people, and there is no greater ROI in any profession!

*It Worked For Me in Life and Leadership, Colin Powell, Harper, New York, 2012. pp 73-76

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