In a world where volatility and rapid change are the norm, leaders must learn to balance seemingly opposing forces. The upcoming book, SHIFT: Leading from the Future – co-authored by Mike Straw, CEO and founder of Achieve Breakthrough, and leadership expert Paul Adams – explores the critical mindset shifts needed to navigate today’s complex business environment. Over recent weeks, we’ve been publishing articles that dive deeper into some of the book’s core themes. Here we examine the concept of empower – not as a buzzword, but as a profound shift in leadership and mindset.
Why empowerment starts with the individual, not the leader
Today’s management speak is all about empowerment: giving teams and employees the ability to make decisions and act according to their own experience and capability. The aspiration and rationale are to create more agile organisations able to react to rapidly changing circumstances. However, two misconceptions often undermine the effectiveness of empowerment. The first is a fundamental misunderstanding of who can ‘empower’ whom, and the second concerns the very role of leadership in empowered organisations.
So, what is empowerment? Every individual is in control of their own power, the degree to which they contribute to organisational goals at any given moment or to any specific task. It is the individual who choses how they commit themselves to a given task, goal or even organisation. Empowerment ultimately comes from the individual, not the leader. The leader’s role is to create the circumstances and context in which everyone feels safe and confident in exerting their own power.
That brings us to the second misconception – the role of leadership in empowered organisations. For many, leadership means getting involved, directing things, being a source of solutions. But all these are aspects of traditional command and control management. To motivate empowered teams, leaders must learn to step back, coach and watch for opportunities to create vitality in teams.
Know yourself first
Effective leadership is built on deep self-knowledge and awareness of the wider context that influences every decision, action and reaction across the organisation. All leadership casts a shadow, whether you are conscious of it or not. The way you intervene, the words you use and the way you act all have a meaningful impact on your teams. You may announce that teams have freedom to experiment and find their own way to meet agreed goals; but if you swoop in to ‘save’ a situation or prevent a breakdown, then teams will feel those permissions were not authentic.
The context of the wider organisation can act in the same way. Accepted ways of doing things, often rooted in long-past situations, organisational structures and market conditions, can subtly restrict individuals’ perception of what is ‘allowed.’ As a leader you must be keenly aware of these contexts and symbols in order to challenge them on behalf of teams. A future-focused mindset, committed to a shared understanding of what the individual, team and organisation are committed to achieve will help them all discover and exercise their true potential power.
Coach potential
This is where the analogy of leader as coach is most apposite. In sports it is the athlete who has the skills, the physicality and the potential to succeed; the coach helps them unlock that promise. Athletes do not improve by mimicking their coaches, nor by allowing them to step in and do things for them. In today’s businesses, leaders must do the same. By working with teams and individuals to help them discover their collective strengths and apply them, not just to replicate the success the leader may have seen, but to move forward, create new opportunity and deliver step-change improvement.
Stimulate learning from breakdowns
Things will go wrong, but just as sports teams learn from defeat, so effective use of ‘breakdowns’ can build the confidence, innovation and motivation needed for truly empowered teams. Actively searching for breakdowns might seem counterintuitive to leadership, but this is not about haranguing players from the sidelines. A dispassionate collective analysis of what’s needed and missing to create success in future situations is far more beneficial that telling people what they did wrong and what they should do next time. Once again, it’s not about what you think as a leader. Your role is spot the breakdowns, the contexts and where your own actions are inhibiting progress. And then to convene the discussion and support the team in its own analysis and innovation in how to overcome them.
Cultivate vitality
Believing that leading empowered teams should be easier than traditional command and control leadership is another common pitfall. As the paragraphs above suggest, if anything it is harder. It is hard for the teams too. Many will be operating outside of their comfort zones whilst putting aside tried and tested approaches, or ‘winning ways,’ that have served them well to this point. Leaders must proactively create environments of deep psychological safety, in which everyone feels supported in being themselves and secure in knowing that delivering their best effort will be respected, whatever the outcome. But, through our work, we have found that something else is needed. A sense of vitality; an ability to create positive energy and engagement.
Teams with vitality react positively to breakdowns, they quickly re-engage and recommit to challenging goals and audacious shared futures. Leaders need to exhibit vitality themselves, but, crucially, must actively cultivate vitality in teams. That means walking a fine line between getting out of the way, and remaining engaged to demonstrate support, trust and confidence in individuals and the team. Constant enrolment and ‘onboarding,’ reminding the team of the shared commitment to success, as well as seeking out the next challenge to keep empowered people motivated, is a vital aspect of creating lasting vitality and an important element of leadership.
Empowerment is a journey
As we investigate in our book SHIFT: Leading from the Future, empowerment does not equal a laissez faire approach to leadership. Nor does empowerment mean unconstrained freedom. Empowered teams are agile, often closer to the root cause, and thus the potential solution to challenges and opportunities, but they still require direction and alignment. Passing orders down the chain of command is sometimes still necessary, especially when those ‘at the coalface’ cannot have the 10,000 foot overview necessary for some decisions. Leaders of empowered teams need not only to flex the level of engagement and control to meet the circumstances, but also be constantly alert to making the right impact on the engagement of their teams. Fostering empowerment is an ongoing act of leadership, not a simple one-time decision and leading empowered teams is perhaps the hardest shift to make for success. But, by avoiding the pitfalls outlined here, it can also be one of the most rewarding and exciting ways to thrive rather than merely survive in today’s business environment.