Empower Your Team Members

“Empower” is one of those words we see a lot of these days, but what does it really mean to a business owner?

It doesn’t mean giving up your authority. It doesn’t mean shuffling off all the responsibilities of ownership onto the shoulders of your team. What it can mean is a big increase in business productivity and team morale and a much lighter workload for you.

Empowering means that you share some of your authority and responsibilities with team members. You’re developing the intellectual capital of your business and giving team members a greater feeling of involvement in the business. You’re also enriching their jobs by giving them greater scope and depth.

It can mean some extra mentoring for you at the start of the process, but the ultimate result is that you have more time to work on your business instead of in it, and the ability to be a more productive manger.

Here are just some tips about empowering the members of your team that you can use as a guide:

1. Analyze those tasks you now perform that could be done by somebody else. Also take a look around your business for tasks that should be done but haven’t been for one reason or another.

2. Assign these tasks to appropriate team members after you ensure it�s within their capabilities and won’t make their workloads too heavy.

3. Whenever you assign a new task to someone explain clearly why you feel they can handle it and let them know it’s part of their overall development.

4. Take the team members receiving new assignments through the tasks in detail. Allow them to ask questions if they want to, and assure them that you’ll be available to assist them if they have any questions.

5. Invite them to consider the methods now being used to accomplish the task and make any recommendations they’d like about alternative ways to do it. You may be surprised at new efficiencies that can be discovered this way.

6. Give your team members the authority they need to perform the task. If it’s a matter of allowing them access to petty cash or facilities such as the internet, set reasonable limits and give them the opportunity to prove themselves.

8. Be very specific about time limits and deadlines. If a task needs to be performed by a particular date tell them and follow up in sufficient time to make sure it’s completed on schedule.

9. Prioritize the work. Tell them clearly how important the task is and how it relates in importance to their other duties. Otherwise you could find that the new task is done first, to the detriment of their other work.

10. Allow employees to be flexible in their methodologies. Unless there are very specific reasons for doing a task in a particular way, encourage them to be creative in their approach to performing it.

11. Give the team members full access to information about the task. Put them fully “in the picture” as to how the task fits into the overall strategy of the business.

12. Encourage your team members to share any insights or new ideas that might arise from their performance of new duties. It may not happen at first but as they get used to doing something new they may find that their perceptions of other areas of the business change as well.

Empowerment naturally involves a bit of risk. There’s always the possibility that the person given the new assignment might not get it right, certainly at first. Don’t let this daunt your enthusiasm for the principle. Learn from any mistakes and apply your own experience to work out how to prevent them from recurring.

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Copyright 2004, RAN ONE Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from www.ranone.com.