Empowering Teams Should Be a Manager's Top Priority: Here's How to Do It

Sometimes managers handwave things like employee engagement or company culture. They may think, "All this culture stuff is out of hand. When I hire someone to do a job, I expect them to do it. They work for me, not the other way around."

This is because some managers lack leadership capacity. They want to demonstrate their positional power, maintain all control and formalize their position of authority by withholding the sharing of power.

When that happens, capable and talented employees find their potential wasted or even punished.

But a healthy team culture of empowerment will encourage and build on employee potential. When that happens, you'll see innovative leaders emerge even in non-managing roles. You'll see more positive client relationships and better problem-solving, and you'll see ideas and initiatives bloom before your eyes.

Empowerment means giving power. The power to make decisions, choose the best course of action and have a voice in the organization.

The opposite of empowerment is micromanagement. Micromanagement is one of the most cited reasons that people leave organizations. This makes sense on a human level. We want to feel valued, respected and trusted in our jobs. We do not want to feel controlled or surveilled.

The importance of empowering your employees goes way beyond a strong team culture. This isn't just about a positive work environment or facilitating good communication. It's also about making management sustainable, increasing productivity, retaining employees, and overall—creating more success for your organization with less effort.

If that sounds good, read on. Here's how empowerment begins.

1. Understand that empowerment starts with leadership

Empowerment isn't the default in organizations. It takes intentional effort and leadership skills from management. When managers don’t feel they can empower their employees, there is only one direction they should point their finger… and it's towards themselves.

Good managers hire capable people, are committed to comprehensive onboarding and training, and know how to provide clear direction. Creating an effective team culture where individual employees are empowered is hard. It takes energy, thoughtfulness and investment up front. But as time goes on, empowered employees will make life easier for managers.

Think of it this way, if a person does not have a voice in decision-making and is required to do things in the way that only the boss sees fit, they will lose their feelings of accountability—especially when their instinct and experience tells them there are better ways of completing the task or achieving the goal.

If managers insist on control over their employee's work, they'll get it. And as a result, they will have to work much harder dictating every step of the way to their teams.

People will have a strengthened desire to exceed expectations when they have the power to choose the steps, process or method to tackle the problem.

2. Make trusting your employees the default stance

If managers are committed to empowering their employees, they need to give trust on day one.

The old adage “trust is earned, not given” is outdated and encourages bias in a leader’s trust-giving. How is trust earned? Is it given more readily to some people while being withheld for others? For example, it is given to people who complete tasks in a similar fashion to the leader, and not to people who choose other ways of doing things? If so, then trust is reserved based on a bias called affinity or similar-to-me bias.

Assume your employees are competent for their roles and are trying to do their best work for the company. When you begin there, you'll build high performing teams that work in ways you may never have considered--and exceed expectations in ways you never thought possible.

3. Demonstrate that you are accountable

Employees will not feel empowered if they can't trust their leaders. So, if anyone needs to earn trust in the workplace culture, it's leadership. By showing vulnerability, admitting mistakes and seeking feedback, leaders set a precedent for trustworthiness.

Nothing will kill your credibility more than standing firm on a failing idea. Your team knows the idea isn’t working. They realize the new software or system you chose isn’t as good as the old system or a different system. When you decide to die on the hill of your choice, you will kill your credibility in the process.

Recognizing and admitting your mistakes as a leader will also help with employee accountability. You can ask your people to hold themselves to a similar standard of honesty and adaptability.

Trust fosters an atmosphere where individuals feel safe to share ideas, take risks and express concerns without fear of judgment or retribution. When trust is present, team members are more likely to engage in open communication, collaborate effectively, and resolve conflicts constructively.

4. Change the way you do performance reviews

In most annual performance reviews (created by senior managers), there is a space for “areas of opportunity” or “weaknesses”. This requires first-level managers to be judges of people, instead of the resource they should be.

With reviews in mind, first-level managers are forced to hunt for employee faults or weaknesses throughout the year. Meaning, if you have exceptional employees who exceed expectations in all major areas of their role, their manager must still act as though they've failed in at least some area to appear honest. Then those excelling employees must sit through a conversation about arbitrary “weaknesses”.

There is no quicker way to ruin a culture or create employee resentment than this one piece of development.

It also breaks the leader-follower trust relationship. For these reasons, some organizations are starting to scrap these traditional annual performance reviews. However, if nothing else, managers should be careful to save the weaknesses for only those that matter to the primary role of the job and instead focus on employees’ strengths. Celebrate their strengths, find them opportunities to develop in their areas of strength, and seek their perspective on how they want to learn, grow and develop.

5. Win as a team and lose as a team

In a great team culture, you won't see people pushing blame around. Celebrate the accomplishments of all individuals and teams. And share the responsibility of a loss by recognizing that with risk-taking and innovation, losses happen. Like Simon Sinek says, “when you choose to be a leader, there are times when things go right, and you have to give away all the credit. When things go wrong, you have to take all the blame.”

6. Be transparent

Often, employee engagement survey results include the desire for more communication.

I think that is often incorrectly read as more meetings, emails and conference calls (do employees really want that?) Typically, no. Employees do not want more meetings. They want more transparency.

They want to know what is happening in the organization before they find out through the informal internal communication grapevine. They want to know how the organizational decisions will impact them, and how they can and should prepare both personally and professionally for any upcoming changes.

Leaders lose the trust of their people when they are dishonest with their teams, including withholding the whole truth regarding the state of the organization. Other transparency issues include gossiping or burying conflict.

Beyond that, clear and consistent communication specifically when it comes to the organizational mission and vision is also vital to trust development and maintenance. When team members understand their role, responsibilities and how their roles fit into the larger mission, they can collaborate more effectively.

7. Provide support, training and resources

Part of empowerment means you are empowering people to have the knowledge, skills and competencies to be more well-rounded capable employees. Invest in some upskilling opportunities and professional development opportunities employees can opt into.

Yes, that does make them more marketable, but caring about your people means caring about their well-being both now and in the future--even if that means they go elsewhere to achieve their professional goals and aspirations. A good team culture will develop into a network that can outlast employee's time in your organization.

8. Empower decision-making

Give people the power to make decisions in their roles and be part of whole-organization decisions. For example, nothing is worse for morale (or customer service) when a customer has a problem and the representative must transfer to someone else to make a decision. Why not let the rep make these choices?

Industry leaders improve their team's culture by offering democratic choices on organizational changes, like what kind of software to implement or how to adjust a mission statement.

9. Recognize expertise, talent and great ideas

Being a leader means recognizing you are not the expert on your team on all things. It requires bringing people together with complementary skills and expertise. Acknowledge the expertise and celebrate the ideas of your team. The greatest sign of intelligence is the recognition of your own gaps in knowledge or understanding.

Are you the kind of person who could empower employees?

Managing people is hard, and empowering them is even harder. But with strong leadership skills and a foundational understanding, you can go a long way.

The benefits of empowered teams include increased job satisfaction, motivation and engagement, which then leads to improved employee retention and productivity.

Beyond that, happy employees lead to happier people… meaning that good quality leaders have an impact beyond the workplace in people’s lives. They should take that responsibility seriously and lead in a way that improves lives and society as a whole.

If you could see yourself implementing some of these strategies and creating a workplace that people thrive in, you should know that an education in management will only expand on this kind of knowledge. When you understand how to approach tough situations and implement your ideas with confidence, you can be the kind of manager people will truly follow.

Check out 7 Surefire Signs You Should Be a Business Management Major.