Benefits of Empowerment
Teams are certainly very relevant and important elements in today’s high-performance organization but the important thing to remember as a leader is that we can’t simply rely on putting highly effective individuals together to make a highly effective team. Empowerment increases the effectiveness of the team and drives many intangible benefits both for the organization and the employees.
Effective teams often require the right mix of people, skills, resources, and a focus on building good working relationships. Empowering your team members allows leaders to utilize the skills, knowledge, experience and motivation of their entire talent base. Let’s understand how to empower your team members to achieve great wins!
What is Empowerment?
Empowerment is the authority or power given to someone to do something. Empowerment refers to the delegation of some authority and responsibility to employees and involving them in the decision-making process, not in mere job activities, but rather at all the levels of management. Empowered employees develop loyalty and trust and they are proud to be working for the company and are eager to contribute to company success. People can be “empowered” to make decisions at work. They can be “empowered” to speak up with new ideas. Employees can also be “empowered” to act when the integrity of the organization is at stake.
Benefits to the Employee
Empowerment provides new opportunities to your team members to develop and stretch beyond their current capabilities and acquire new skills. It helps in increasing their motivation level, creates new opportunities to develop their leadership skills and satisfy their self-actualization needs. Empowered employees have increased self-confidence, are keen to develop their own skills, and also to find ways to make use of those skills to the company's benefit.
It brings a sense of ownership to the employee due to which he personalizes the goals and objectives of the organization and associates his success with his own abilities. Also, the performance of the employee improves as he attaches self-induced rewards with his performance by making decisions pertaining to the problem and sees the results (success) that follow.
Benefits to the Organization
On the other hand, it brings immense benefits to the organization and to the project or the program. Performance increases, people feel more satisfied and there is low attrition. You can achieve great results and exposure builds the leadership pipeline for your organization. Empowerment is all about mutual success where everyone wins.
Empowerment increases the organization’s responsiveness towards the problems or issues. Also, there is an increase in the productivity of an employee as he is completely engaged with the firm and takes decisions for the betterment of the organization as a whole. The benefits are numerous and well-documented — happier, more productive employees, a higher level of engagement, enhanced customer service, reduced stress, increased innovation, more pride and loyalty, less stagnancy, and an organization that is more adaptable to change. Plus, it just makes the workplace more pleasant for everyone.
Empowering your team is not difficult, but it does require a conscious effort. A tremendous shift in thinking is required by both leaders and professionals to make empowerment work.
Related Links
You May Also Like
-
Appreciative leaders encourage contributions from those around them and facilitate the discussion to mutually solve problems. Understand the concept of Appreciative Leadership and learn about tools to create and ask powerful questions - that lead to new discoveries and possibilities. Instead of focusing on what’s wrong in the workplace, learn about, and build upon what works. Learn in this article the art to apply appreciative inquiry to specific situations and challenges at your workplace.
-
Recognizing Stress & its Sources
As an individual, you almost certainly know what stress feels like. Stressors are events or situations to which people must adjust. Stressors may be physical or psychological in nature. The level of severity of stress is determined not merely by exposure but the intensity, duration, and frequency of stressors. The sources of stress are many. They arise from multiple areas both with the individual and from the environment.
-
All the teams are dynamic in nature and they take time to come together, they form, develop, and grow in stages, over a period of time. Teams go through five progressive stages: Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing and Adjourning. In this article, we want to introduce you to these stages of team development and certain strategies that you can use to help the team grow and develop in each of these stages.
-
Benefits of Teams in Workplace
The use of formal work teams is commonplace in modern organizations. But why we have teams? What are the benefits or advantages that teams provide for organizations and employees? Do we really need to adopt formal team structures and use team-building approaches in organizations? Read this article to explore and learn the benefits of having formal teams in organizations.
-
Generating Ideas using SCAMPER
SCAMPER is an activity-based thinking process that can be performed by Cooperative learning. SCAMPER is an acronym that provides a structured way of assisting students to think out of the box and enhance their knowledge. This can be used in the organizational context as a technique for creative problem solving and as a toolkit to generate fresh ideas.
-
Participative leadership is one of the most effective styles and creates higher productivity, better contributions from group members, and increased group morale. The democratic leadership style consists of the leader sharing the decision-making abilities with group members by promoting the interests of the group members. Learn more about this leadership style and situations when it is effective.
-
Creating Highly Effective Teams
How do we create effective teams? What comes to mind when you think about an effective team? High performing teams exhibit accountability, purpose, cohesiveness, and collaboration. It is a team that works seamlessly as a whole. Everyone brings unique talents and strengths and support each other to bring out the best in everyone. How do you create one?
-
Effective Business Communication
Communication is all about getting the message across correctly. To make this happen, you need to have good speaking skills and good writing skills. If you have these skills coupled with good listening skills and interest in reading, you have all the potential to be a good communicator. What things should the leader take into consideration to be more effective with interpersonal communication?
-
“Level 5 Leadership”, this term was coined by Jim Collins in his book “Good to Great” and it is all about achieving "Greatness" as a leader. This article will explain what we mean by Level 5 Leadership and what the characteristics of a Level 5 leader are. What it takes to achieve greatness as a leader, and what are the steps and strategies that one can use to move up to this top level of leadership.
-
Teams are certainly very relevant and important elements in today’s high-performance organization but the important thing to remember as a leader is that we can’t simply rely on putting highly effective individuals together to make a highly effective team. Empowerment increases the effectiveness of the team and drives many intangible benefits both for the organization and the employees.
