Empowering your team

Could you possibly be disempowering your team? Try this quiz.

• Is your team not taking enough responsibility despite being empowered?
• How can you avoid blame and improve the situation?
• How might your culture or your management style be blocking your team's willingness to take more responsibility?
• Have you asked them for feedback on these questions?
• Is there a strong atmosphere of fear preventing risk taking?
• What can you do to alleviate it?
• Or, are you reluctant to empower others for fear of losing control, of things going wrong and making you look bad?
• Given the potential benefits of empowerment, is this not a risk worth taking?
• What's the worst that can happen? What is your fall back position?

Steps to empower your team

• First, what's in it for you if your team is more empowered?
• Being clear about your own motivation might raise your commitment.
• What obstacles to empowerment are there in your culture or style?
• How can you minimize their effects?
• What decisions do you want your team to make that they're not making?
• Are you willing to relinquish your own power to make these decisions?
• Or are you going to take it back the first time a mistake is made?
• Can you avoid punishing mistakes and eliminate a ''blame'' culture?
• How are you going to improve your team's confidence to make decisions that they might see as career-limiting risks?
• How can you empower without feeling that you are losing control?

See these pages for related tips:

Coaching your team
Managing performance
Delegation