Empower Your Employees. It's Easy!
When you empower someone, you provide the training and guidance to
cultivate skills that serve them for a lifetime. You start with a
person's basic talents and then structure opportunities to
incrementally build skills and confidence levels.
Think about how a mama bird cares for her young. At first she
provides everything. Her chicks are helpless, totally reliant, and
will die without her constant attention. As they grow stronger, she
gives them more of the survival responsibility. She guides them,
shows them how and where to find food, and how to stay safe from
predators. Little by little, she steps back and makes them do more
of the work, often to their loud disapproval. She teaches them
essential skills and when they are sufficiently grown, she pushes
them out of the nest to fly on their own. And so the cycle
continues.
Think about what would happen if mama bird didn't follow this
pattern. As her chicks grew she would spend more and more time
trying to find enough food to satisfy them, to her own detriment.
The chicks would be totally helpless and would soon perish because
they didn't know where or how to find food. They have no survival
skills.
Without empowerment, you deprive a person of experiences to build
skills and so they remain dependent. They become weak and powerless
when everything is done for them. When you make all the decisions;
you don't assist them, you just keep the power. People, who feel
powerless stop trying, stop caring, feel disillusioned, and
disengage from the process. You aren't doing a person any favors or
saving them any pain by depriving them of the opportunity to
exercise the power they have within.
When you empower someone, you give them the tools to determine their
own destiny. You help people recognize they are important, that
their input matters. The empowering process snowballs into increased
independence, self-reliance, strength, and belief in one's
abilities. You make people self-sufficient and put them in control
of their own destiny.
The empowering process:
1. Involve people in determining the means to reach goals.
2. Encourage and praise all contributions along the way.
3. Be willing to delegate work.
4. Have high expectations. People rise to expectations of them. If
you believe they will succeed and communicate this to them, it is
human nature to do everything they can to fulfill your expectations.
5. Have faith. When you assign a task, let the person get the job
done. If you micro-manage, people tend to lose faith in their
abilities and may become resentful.
6. Celebrate milestones. Celebrate each achievement along the way.
Give credit where credit is due and recognize all contributions.
Empower your people. Help them soar to heights they only imagined
possible!
About the Author:
Karen S. Sieczka is the founder of Karen S. Sieczka Training and
Curriculum Development, http://home.earthlink.net/~ksieczka/. She is
currently writing Foundations of Leadership, a workbook on
leadership development and has developed short trainings on employee
enrichment issues. Sieczka also writes articles and tip sheets on
various subjects including aging, literacy, and crisis
communications issues. She can be reached at ksieczka@earthlink.net
