Four Ways Empowering Leadership Enables Empowered Employees

Leaders play a prominent role in communicating a project’s vision, mission, and abilities to their team members and employees. They develop a team with people from diverse backgrounds specializing in skills that are different but crucial to a project’s success. 

So, what’s the primary goal of a leader? Empowering the employees to make decisions, deal with problems, and work toward personal and professional development. That’s what empowering leadership is all about. 

What is Empowering Leadership?

Leadership empowerment is more than a philosophy or theoretical concept. It’s a skill that managers and team leads need.

Empowering leadership fosters a culture of personal growth, where employees learn to manage themselves and, feel motivated to perform well. Yes, they’ll be independently making decisions this way, but remember, this in no way undermines the leadership role.

Empowering leadership starts between your ears. The assumptions you make about your employees drive your behavior toward them. Behave toward them in ways that will change their assumptions about your role and their personal role in the work that they do. Help them behave in ways that conform to these new and more empowered assumptions.

Empowering leadership can create empowered employees, and empowered employees can create better solutions to your shared problems. Give yourself permission to make your job easier and your organization more successful by changing the way you think about your employees and your role as a leader.

How to Empower Employees?

According to sociological studies, there are four distinct ways to empower team members:

• Show them reports and statistics of how their work contributes to the organizational goals.
• Build opportunities for them to grow and improve a team’s abilities.
• Delegate decision-making tasks.
• Focus on people’s strengths and see it’s impact on their performance.

Traits of Empowered Employees

Psychologically empowered employees believe:

1. Their work is personally important
2. They have the ability to successfully perform tasks
3. They have the freedom to choose how to initiate and carry out tasks and
4. Their personal behavior at work contributes to important outcomes. (Spreitzer, 1995).

This sense of meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact enables employees to perform their work with initiative and persistence.

An exceptional recent study published in the Academy of Management Journal showed that psychological empowerment had a significant effect on employee creativity. 

Empowered employees demonstrated higher intrinsic motivation and were also more engaged in the creative process of identifying problems, searching for information, and generating unique ideas to solve problems.

Some would argue that not all jobs require creativity. But all jobs encounter problems, and when those problems inevitably occur, it’s both more efficient and more effective to rely on the creativity of your employees to help plan and implement the solutions. Empowered employees improve your ability to excel as a leader.

Four Ways Empowering Leadership Enables Empowered Employees

According to a study, empowering leadership greatly impacts employee innovation behaviors.

Some employees want to be empowered more than others. A study demonstrated that when an employee’s identification with empowerment is low, the empowering leader can help employees in four ways:

1. Enhance the Meaningfulness of Work
   1. Help employees understand the purpose, goals, and objectives of the company
   2. Help employees understand the importance of their work to the overall effectiveness of the company
2. Foster Participation in Decision Making
   1. Consult employees on decisions that affect them
   2. Share decision-making responsibility with employees
3. Express Confidence in High Performance
   1. Let employees know you believe they have the ability to improve even when they make mistakes
   2. Let employees know you believe they can handle demanding tasks
4. Provide Autonomy from Bureaucratic Constraints
   1. Allow employees to make important decisions quickly to satisfy customer needs
   2. Keep rules and regulations simple and allow employees freedom in the way they perform the job

Benefits of Empowering Leadership

Empowering leadership has a number of benefits not just for the employees but also management and the organization in general. Let’s take a look at a few:

• Trust. As per research, there’s a very strong connection between empowering leadership style and trust.
• Increased Productivity. When employees are empowered they are more motivated and focused towards their goals.
• Bottom line. When employees perform, your organization grows, and you can better achieve the targets and goals, including meeting your bottom line.
• Job Satisfaction. An engaged and valued workforce is happy with their work, can build healthy relationships at work and in life, and achieves their success goals. 
• Innovative Minds. When team members worked under empowering leadership, they were more open about their ideas and thoughts, which led to the team finding innovative solutions to the most challenging problems.
• Employee Retention. Happy employees tend to stick around. According to research, 91% of people cited that they liked their workplace better when they could trust the team leader.

Wrap Up

Just handing over decks of paperwork or a handful of decision-making responsibilities isn’t enough to get an empowered workforce. You need to support them at every step. 

The leader’s responsibility falls here: they need to be present for the team in their time of need to coach and mentor them. This is how they can help them develop important skills that’ll help them and your organization in the future.

Unfortunately, according to a report, 41% of employees state that their superiors don’t give them enough recognition. So, leadership doesn’t come naturally. It’s a skill to be acquired and learned over time, and you’ll be thrilled to know that the results of empowering leadership extend beyond generating empowered employees to high-performing individuals and talent retention.

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Bret L. Simmons, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Management at The University of Nevada, Reno. He earned his doctorate in Business Administration at Oklahoma State University. Bret blogs about leadership and social business at his website Positive Organizational Behavior. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.