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Most leaders talk about empowerment without truly understanding what it means. And that's why it's so easy to kill the empowerment that you're trying so hard to give to your team.
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Welcome to the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. In a world where knowledge has become a commodity, this podcast is designed to give you something more access to the experience of a successful CEO who has already walked the path. So join your host, Martin Moore, who will unlock and bring to life your own leadership experiences and accelerate your journey to leadership excellence.
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Welcome to Moments with Marty, your short, sharp shot of leadership insight to help you stay on track between our weekly episodes of the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. Pretty much every leader talks about empowerment, yet every one of them has a completely different understanding of what empowerment actually means. It's been kind of dumbed down over the years to become a very vague and aspirational concept. True empowerment is anything but that. It's a core driver of performance. If you can't empower people effectively, they'll never willingly shoulder single point accountability. And that will massively undermine the results they're able to deliver. Empowerment isn't just about hiring good people and getting out of their way. It's a really active process. There are half a dozen things you need to give people to truly empower them. They need context, they need goal clarity, they need to be able to focus on the most critical work. They need appropriate resourcing, they need clear decision making rights, and they need guidance and mentoring from you. Now as you can see, these things won't just happen organically. You have to work with your people to drive a constructive high performance culture right through the line of leadership. And of course, very few leaders do all of these things all of the time. But there's one thing in particular that will undo all the other good work super quickly. Not allowing them to make the decisions they need to make to deliver results. People crave freedom of decision making and self determination. Without it, they feel insignificant and motivation suffers accordingly. Having the freedom to make decisions gives your people the opportunity to grow and to develop their own capability. It empowers them to control their destiny and to shape the outcomes that they're accountable for. If you don't preserve their decision rights, they'll feel trapped. They may even feel scapegoated when they sense that they don't have the control they need to do their job. Making sure that you don't trample all over your people's decision rights is harder than it sounds because with all the best intentions, you can do it accidentally. When your people come to you for guidance. It's so easy to put your thumb on the scale. I used to be a master at this. Someone had come to me and lay out a problem and subconsciously I would see it as a perfect opportunity to show them how smart I was as I rolled out my elegant solution. And I thought I was actually being a good leader when I said, look, this is completely your call and I'll go with whatever you decide. But if it were up to me, I'd be thinking about this. I basically told them what I wanted and quietly pushed them down a path that I chose, not them. I shared the decision making accountability with them and by telling them what I would do, I took their control away. A subtle difference? Sure, you've got to know how to support, mentor and help your people to solve problems without giving them the answers. If you do, you'll quietly kill their empowerment and you won't even know you've done it. If you want to make sure you don't accidentally take control away from your team, have a listen to episode 374 of the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast, the biggest killer of empowerment. We'll leave a link in the show notes. I really hope you enjoyed this moment and that it gives you that extra little spark to be a no Bullshit Leader.