Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Successfully Empower Your Employees!

First, ask yourself...
Would you like to be able to empower your employees to make more decisions on their own?

Empowering employees helps free up the manager's time for more important tasks, and helps to develop the employees' skills and increase their engagement at the same time. Empowerment is obviously a good thing, but how come we are not always able to empower our employees as much as we would like? Well, many factors contribute, but one that is often overlooked is the amount of information we share with them, and how this act (information sharing) directly impacts our ability to empower, and their success when empowered!

When we actively and openly share information with our employees, 3 major outcomes are likely to occur:
  1. Commitment and overall employee engagement will increase since they will feel like a bigger and more integral part of the team
  2. The amount of innovation and proactiveness on their part will skyrocket
  3. They will have the knowledge and ability to make decisions on their own (no longer will they have to run to us every time they have a question, or encounter a problem or challenge).
So what info do we share? Well, each organization is different, and each employee is different. A few ideas to get you started: company financial data, the needs and wants of the customers, strengths and weaknesses of the organization, info about competition, and overall organization and team goals.

This tip was taken from "Empowering Others for Success" which is the July session of The Compass Program. Click Here to view the schedule of all 12 sessions for The Compass Program.

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