Tag: Management

7 Traits Great Leaders Share that Enable Empowering Others

Leaders that excel at the law of empowerment recognize seven important factors and comply with those seven factors to build strong capabilities in those they lead.
Team Empowerment


7 Factors Needed to Empower Those You Lead

1. Value people. Leaders that truly value people and appreciate the benefits received through teams that demonstrate thought and skill diversity are more prone to empower others.
2. Share Vision – people flourish in environments where they feel they are part of something bigger than themselves. Leaders that share their vision focus their teams to pursue a common direction and empower them to work towards a common goal and purpose.
3. Communicate. Leaders that communicate the direction and provide clear objectives build a mental model or picture that guides their team toward success.
4. Trust people. Leaders that trust people to make the right choices find following the empowerment law much easier than those leaders reluctant to trust. I find that most people want to do the right thing. Leaders that model good leadership behaviors discover that others will also learn and model those behaviors.
5. Enable effective decision-making. Leaders that empower effectively provide the information necessary for team members to make decisions. Poor leaders shy away from the effort to create the environment for others to make decisions opting instead to withhold the decision-making authority for themselves. This simply creates bottlenecks, limits capacity, and prevents growing other strong leaders.
6. Delegate. Leaders must learn to delegate in order to empower people. Many leaders consider delegation a lose of their own power. But leaders that delegate effectively find that building other strong leaders earns them even more power and influence. Effective delegation requires delegation of authority and establishing accountability. See article Improve your Capacity with Effective Delegation for additional information.
7. Recognize and reward positive empowered behaviors. Behaviors that get rewarded get repeated. Great leaders recognize the power of genuine and well-timed praise and rewards.

I wish you well on your personal growth journey. I appreciate your additional insight, so feel free to comment to share your thoughts and experiences.

Links
12 – The Law of Empowerment
Improve your Capacity with Effective Delegation

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Improve your Capacity with Effective Delegation

Busy ManIn the article, 8 – The Law of Intuition, I discussed the importance of delegation to improve your capacity to get things done, improve your leadership, and to grow the leadership ability of other people. This article provides additional detail about this critical leadership skill.

Delegation is a vital managerial tool that increases productivity and builds employees. Numerous authors provide several common techniques for accomplishing successful delegation. The techniques are easily traced to the four fundamentals of management: planning, organizing, leading, and controlling. Implicit in the techniques are keys skills that underlie the success. This article provides some insight on delegation and some tips to increase your delegation effectiveness.

The Chartered Management Institute (2000) states, “Delegation is about entrusting others with appropriate responsibility and authority for the operation and/or accomplishment of certain activities.” Many companies believe in the development of employees especially when an employee shows promise as a future leader. Many employers develop employees in several ways such as providing educational assistance, on-the-job training, and challenging job assignments. One method for providing challenging job assignments is to delegate managerial responsibilities.

Delegating managerial responsibilities provides two important benefits. First, delegation provides managers the opportunity to spread workload across multiple people. Sharing the workload affords the manager the option to accomplish more tasks, thereby, increasing the productivity of the department. The manager who demonstrates effective delegation exhibits true leadership. Second, delegation provides an opportunity to provide training for future leaders. When a manager effectively delegates workload, he or she teaches important leadership skills and, at the same time, instills a sense of confidence in those led.

Pollock (2003) provides seven secrets of successful delegation.
1. Delegate the right function
2. Plan the delegated job
3. Establish standard
4. Include feedback procedures
5. Pick the right person
6. Document the assignment
7. Give the assignment

These tasks include what Bateman and Snell (2004) argue are necessary for successful delegation: allocation of responsibility, authority, and accountability.

Most companies implement some form of a performance management system to document the tasks allocated to employees. During the planning cycle, the manager and employee document the task, the desired outcomes, and identify potential roadblocks. The authority delegated to the employee is often implicit in the desired outcome but rarely stated explicitly. The authority typically includes the ability to organize and use resources to accomplish the task. The best managers mentor the employees, when necessary, to ensure the employees’ success. Using the performance management system offers the opportunity to document accomplishments or provide corrections on a regular basis. The checkpoints provide a control mechanism that ensures managers communicate with employees.

Any system, when evaluated for effectiveness, has opportunities for improvement. A company’s performance management system is a tool and is only as effective as the manager and employee using it. Each manager and employee should seriously plan and document the delegated tasks. Many times the tasks are documented generically to avoid reworking effort when goals change, diminishing the overall effectiveness of the system. One of the secrets of delegation success is documenting the task (Pollock, 2003), so managers can increase delegation effectiveness by effectively using the performance management tool.

Communication and coaching are two skills that increase the effectiveness of the delegation process. The employee must understand the assigned task. The manager must possess the ability to communicate tasks unambiguously. Clearly defining the boundaries of a task, without defining the method, allows the employee some creative leeway to accomplish tasks. The coaching concept is readily visible in professional sports and is applicable in the workplace. The best managers coach their employees to peak performance. Coaches use the skills of the players and integrate those skills to accomplish the team goals. Likewise, good managers use the skills of employees and integrate those skills to accomplish organizational goals.

Delegation allows a manager the platform to build and manage an organization. Rather than trying to accomplish every task alone, successfully delegating work increases productivity and demonstrates leadership skills. Delegation allows a manager to coach employees and leverage other people’s skills to accomplish organizational goals.

What others are writing
Reasons why delegation is hard for some managers
Doing More with Less – Effective Delegation

I would love to read your comments. Please share your experiences!

References
Bateman, T.S., Snell, S.A., (2004). Management: The New Competitive Landscape (6th ed.). McGraw-Hill/Irwin,New York, NY
Chartered Management Institute. (2000). Successful Delegation. Retrieved 7/25/2005 from InfoTrac OneFile database.
Pollock, T. (2003). Secrets of Successful Delegation. Electric Light and Power. 81(5). Retrieved 7/25/2005 from InfoTrac OneFile Database.

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