Achieve Better Outcomes While Empowering Employees

First, ask yourself...
Are your employees ever unsuccessful when they are empowered with brand new tasks for the first time?

Empowering someone is an excellent way to develop their skills, and increase their commitment to the goals of the team/organization. However, if the proper steps are not followed, the act of empowerment can backfire - often resulting in conflict, mutual lack of confidence, and a regression in that particular employee's performance AND desire to be empowered again in the future.

The 1st step (out of many) to successfully empower someone is to provide them with an extremely clarified description of the role or responsibility that you would like them to perform. Seems like common sense, right? Unfortunately, this easy but important step is often overlooked due to our tendency to assume that since WE know exactly what to do and how to do it, that means the OTHER PERSON does as well.

Clearly communicating exactly what the task is will ensure the employee fully understands what to do. Going into specific detail will also proactively uncover questions they might have - usually ones that you would have never thought to address!