28: Empowerment series - Is empowering others counterintuitive to you? That wouldn't be unusual
Nov 11, 2019
auto_awesome
This podcast explores the challenges of empowering others in leadership roles, emphasizing the shift in leadership skills required. It discusses traits of successful leaders, the role of leaders in fostering empowerment, steps to effective empowerment, and the benefits of empowerment on individuals and leaders.
Leaders need to redefine their roles to promote empowerment and build trust with their team members.
Empowerment benefits both employees and leaders by fostering trust, motivation, engagement, and shared responsibilities.
Deep dives
Challenges in Empowering Others
Empowering others can be challenging due to ingrained leadership instincts that focus on personal success rather than facilitating empowerment. Skills like getting things done, solving problems independently, impressing and influencing others, and making decisions based on limited information contribute to individual success but may hinder the empowerment of others.
Establishing Empowerment Patterns
Leaders often exhibit a pattern of behavior where they provide solutions instead of empowering team members to make decisions. This dynamic can lead to team members becoming dependent on the leader for solutions, creating a culture of non-empowerment within the organization. In order to promote empowerment, leaders need to redefine their roles and focus on building trust with their team.
Benefits of Empowerment
Empowerment benefits both employees and leaders. Empowered individuals feel motivated, engaged, and in control of their destiny, leading to a more fulfilling work experience. For leaders, empowerment lightens the burden of carrying all responsibilities alone, allowing them to focus on long-term goals and strategies, and fostering a sense of trust within the team for delegation.
Increasing empowerment makes demands on both parties, the empowerer and the empoweree. This episode on Empowerment covers some of the challenges an empowerer faces, in particular because the very characteristics that served to advance our career as a leader in the past can become barriers to empowerment in the future unless they're faced and overcome.