9 tips for Empowering Others

Our second assessment in our Leadership Development Model is nothing else, but Empowering Others. Hereby, for us in AIESEC, it is crucial to educate people in-and-out of the organization on how we can develop this skill, and how we can become a better leader in our everyday lives.

If you want to stand out from the crowd as a leader, you need to acquire the ability to empower your team to thrive in the changing business world. Especially today, because organizations are witnessing and experiencing employee morale plummet, thus a leader who is capable of empowering their people is critical. 

Creating an empowering atmosphere in your organization not only spreads the workload throughout your team, but will also make them become more engaged, and encourage them to contribute more. An engaged workforce also helps to build morale and engage themselves. When all parts of an organization are optimistic and enthusiastic about the future of business, companies are much more likely to overcome the challenges they are facing.

So, how do you empower people in your workplace? 

Empowering People in the Workplace

1. Cooperate with Others

Empowering people means engaging them and cooperating with their needs – listening to their ideas, offering feedback, valuing their input.  You can greatly motivate your team with these simple strategies which will also have them more inclined to help you reach your goals. Empowering people is critical to building a high-performing team. When you have access to every individual’s knowledge and skills, and you also trust them to do their jobs without you micromanaging, the team becomes much more efficient. 

2. Empower Everyone

As a good leader, you should be empowering everyone you come into contact with regularly. Obviously, your team at work is an important place to start, but empowering people in your family adds the same benefits to your home life. 

3. Always be Positive

One of the key qualities of a leader is their ability to control their emotions and stay calm and collected when faced with hardships. This is especially true today when many teams are turning to their leaders for the optimism that they are rapidly losing. When it comes to empowering people, you need to maintain positivity at all times. The emotions you express will affect those around you – if you want positive, enthusiastic team members, then you have to show up as positive and enthusiastic yourself. 

4. Be Appreciative

This should be an obvious one, but saying ‘thank you’ goes a long way. Demonstrating appreciation and basic courtesy is critical to empowering people. No matter how small or insignificant the task may be – make sure you’re saying thanks. Giving a bracelet, drawing that you made for them personally, anything that you think they can keep can create a much stronger connection and feeling in a person than e.g. giving a bar of chocolate to somebody. Acknowledging people’s contributions and efforts is an excellent strategy for building rapport and ultimately, trust. 

5. Ask Them What Their Goals Are

As a Team Leader, you can consider yourself a mentor as well. Your job is not creating an alter-ego of yourself and then telling them what to do. Your job is to ask questions and tell your own stories if the situation requires it. Thereby they can realize their own potential and individual goals. This is the foundation to empower other people. Show them that you’re interested in what they hope to achieve and that you’ll be there to support them.

Many individuals don’t have a career or task-specific goal in mind, and even more, are finding it hard to maintain clarity in what those objectives are with the global situation. Encouraging employees to think about both their current and future objectives reminds them to maintain optimism towards what’s ahead for them, giving them a sense of control and choice. 

6. Help Them Find Their Strengths

An individual’s strengths in the workplace are not just the skills they contribute to any given project or goal – it’s those skills they possess and have yet to discover. Providing opportunities for people to either learn a new skill or realize their hidden strengths or talents can be an incredibly empowering experience for employees.   

7. Lead by Example

If you want your team to embrace specific behaviors, one of the least efficient ways to go about encouraging those behaviors is to order them to do it. While you should always keep a clear, stable leadership voice within your organization, very few people like being told what to do in such a manner, even by their team leader. A much better option is simply to lead by example. Ensure you’re always there early and ready to go. Want them to hit deadlines? Have all your work done on time? Showing how you want something done is much more effective at empowering people than telling them what to do. 

8. Give Your Team Autonomy

Micromanaging is the opposite of empowering people. Many leaders may be feeling that given the current work from home scenario, and the resulting loss of morale amongst team members, that they have to increase efforts of engaging with their employees directly. While some may benefit from more consistent communication, especially if work has shifted to remote efforts rather than in-office collaboration, you should still aim to give your team space and the time to do their work. This demonstrates that you trust them to get their tasks done, encouraging self-discipline and ultimately leading to more proactive productivity.

9. Don’t Give Your Team the Answers – Help Them to Find Them

This is an important point when it comes to empowering people. If you’ve given your team autonomy, and have empowered them to work through tasks on their own, supplying them with answers to every question they have would defeat the benefits of self-discovery. Providing answers is essentially telling them what they need to do, which undermines the whole idea of autonomy, and empowering people. 

Manage yourself – point them in the right direction, and encourage them to try and solve the problem on their own. This doesn’t mean you can’t help them out by providing information, tips, or resources, but refrain from giving direct answers. This will encourage their autonomy, and provide them a reason to be proactive in their efforts, ultimately engaging them with their work in a far more direct manner.