16 Key Principles of Employee Empowerment

Truly Empower Employees to Ensure Success and Progress

The Credo of an Empowering Manager: “Don’t try to Manage People, Lead them.”

Guide them (Don’t only direct them) – Provide the Vision, Mission & Culture (Values), train them, facilitate their work, coordinate supplies, assets, and interaction with entities outside their team, remove obstacles that hinder fulfilling the Strategic Plan.

“Employee Empowerment Equals Engagement”

Your goal is to create a work environment in which people are empowered, productive, contributing, and content in their work. Don’t hobble them by limiting their tools or information. Trust them to do the right thing. Get out of their way and watch them catch fire.

The following are the 16 most important principles for managing people in a way that reinforces employee empowerment, accomplishment, and contribution. These management actions enable both the people who work with you and the people in your team to soar.

1. Demonstrate That You Value People
   Your regard for people shines through in all of your actions and words. Your facial expression, body language, and words express what you think about the people who report to you. Your goal is to demonstrate your appreciation for each person’s unique value. No matter how an employee performs on their current task, your value for the employee as a human being should never falter and always be visible.
2. Share Leadership Vision
   Help people feel that they are part of something bigger than themselves and their individual job. Do this by ensuring they know and have access to the organization’s overall mission, vision, and strategic plans.
3. Share Goals, Guidelines, and the Strategic Plan
   Share the most important (and all the pertinent) goals and plan details for your group. Where possible, either make progress on goals measurable and observable or ascertain that you have shared your picture of a positive outcome with the people responsible for accomplishing the results.
4. Make the Goals Challenging and Hold Everyone Responsible for meeting the Company’s Strategic Goals
   Empowerment isn’t focused on making everybody happy; however, that tends to be one of the positive side-effects; it’s about getting everyone and all activities focused on achieving the Strategic Plan and Goals.

   

   Note: Make sure that your goals include heavy Customer Focus, encourage creativity & innovation and reflect your Company’s vision & values.

   Locke et al. (1981) examined the behavioral effects of goal-setting, concluding that 90% of laboratory and field studies involving specific and challenging goals led to higher performance than did easy or no goals.

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   Along with giving employees a voice in setting the goals and planning the strategy, you also need to hold them accountable and responsible for meeting the stated goals. This is an essential element in helping employees realize a sense of responsibility and accomplishment, which leads to higher job satisfaction.

5. Provide Relevant, Regular and Progressive Training
   This is an essential requirement, not an optional element of empowerment. Training is one of the most neglected areas in small businesses, limiting those companies’ growth and success. Training is an investment, not simply a cost. All the most successful companies of the 21st Century invest heavily in training because they have realized and measured the benefit.
6. Trust People
   Trust the intentions of people to do the right thing, make the right decision, and make choices that, while maybe not exactly what you would decide, still work. When employees receive clear expectations from their manager, they relax and trust you. They focus their energy on accomplishing, not on wondering, worrying, and second-guessing.

   I, however, believe in Ronald Regan’s philosophy, “Trust but verify”. That means you have to measure performance results, share the statistics and meaningful analysis with your team, and together, plan the adjustments. I am an avid advocate of employee empowerment but regularly check on team members’ performance, make myself available to answer questions, and provide modified guidance as a situation may dictate.

7. Provide Information for Decision Making
   Make certain that you have given your people (or made sure that they have access to) all the information they need to make thoughtful decisions in a timely manner.
8. Delegate Authority and Impact Opportunities, Not Just More Work
9. Provide Frequent Respectful Feedback
10. Solve Problems: Make it about the facts, not personalities
11. Listen to Learn and Ask Questions to Provide Guidance
12. Take the Time to work on Team Dynamics and Cohesion
    Many companies pay “lip service” to “Teamwork”, but it’s only a “Paper Tiger”. Their program has no bite, no power.
13. Develop & Implement a Formal Communication Plan
    
    • Effective communications do not happen by accident.
    • Communications is a support function
    • Plan communications from the inside–out
14. Communication Best Practices
    
    • Set clear, measurable objectives.
    • Drive alignment.
    • Set yourself up for success.
    • Focus on audiences.
    • See messaging as one of your core products.
    • Design the tactical mix strategically.

    For more details, please fill out our Contact Form and request a copy of our complete White Paper, “Best Practices in Strategic Communications Planning.”

15. Measure & Analyze Team & Individual Performance, as well as Key Processes
    
    This relates directly to Principle 9 – Provide Frequent Respectful Feedback. To provide meaningful feedback, you need to conduct viable measurements and analyses of the Company, team, and individual performance. “Information is Power”. If you organize and share information well with your team, you make them more powerful and potentially much more effective. Subsequently, you will likely make your company more successful.

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16. Help Employees Feel Rewarded and Recognized for Empowered Behavior
    Regardless of how mechanically, technically, and statistically our businesses are driven, it still comes down to the people element, whether a company is effective and thriving in the long term. Leaders must deal effectively with the emotions and other messy realities of people.

    As stated above, establishing responsibility and goal challenges actually improves job satisfaction and overall employee morale, as long as the goals are S.M.A.R.T., i.e., Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

    To motivate, goals must have:

    1. Clarity.
    2. Challenge.
    3. Commitment.
    4. Feedback.
    5. Task complexity.

Challenge

One of the most critical characteristics of goals is setting the level of challenge. People are often motivated by achievement, and they’ll judge a goal based on the significance of the anticipated accomplishment. When you know that what you do will be well received, there’s a natural motivation to do a good job.

Studies consistently show that assigning Challenging Goals and/or Complex Duties tend to increase job satisfaction and productivity.

Another principle to always keep in mind when setting challenging goals is to ensure the goals you set are focused on and are relevant to the Company/s Strategic Plan and Goals.

Want to Learn More?

For more information, please fill out our Contact Form and request a copy of our complete White Paper, “16 Key Principles of Employee Empowerment.” You can also email us at info@diadconsulting.com to request the paper.