Utpal Writes          On Project Management, Leadership, Technology and Self-Help

When your people are empowered, a major pillar of your business becomes real strong. Their job commitment is increased and they feel more powerful about their abilities. Empowerment encourages ownerships. It means they are ready to attack on the tasks fearlessly and everybody would love to agree that fearless teams would achieve much better results than fearful teams.

It is about engaging both minds and hearts of the people so that they can make opportunities out of all the possibilities that the workplace throws onto them.

Here’re 20 empowerment tips you can use to empower your people:

1. Like attracts like. Create an empowerment-focused culture.
2. Entrust them. Do more than more than mere delegation.
3. Actively involve them in setting their goals, performance-standards and measures.
4. Have them act fearlessly and without red-tapes.
5. Make their scope wider. Let them plan, act and monitor their own execution.
6. Encourage them to come up with solutions along with problems.
7. Establish a culture of self-inspired teams where team can set their own objectives, benchmarks and execute accordingly.
8. Encourage that “What needs to be done” come from bottom-up rather than top-down.
9. Encourage them to accept their mistakes and help them learn from that.
10. Make training a #1 priority
11. Help them visualize their clear growth path.
12. Help them recognize the habits which are in their way of empowerment and encourage them to eliminate those. One habit per month works most of the time.
13. Share your vision vividly and do everything to get their buy-in.
14. Listen. Give them attention. Trust.
15. Publicly acknowledge them for the skills and the knowledge that they have.
16. Give Rewards. Even a little non-financial reward works well in many cases.
17. Make sure that when they leave office, they are satisfied. They should be feeling good about what they have done and confident about what they will do better tomorrow.
18. Never ask blaming questions like “Why the hell you do not understand this?” instead, ask them, “What can I do so that we both (or all!) are on the same page?”
19. Show that you’re comfortable even when your people disagree with you. Disagreements are fine if they help achieve the objective (by unveiling more clarity about the subject) .
20. When things are not executed your way but served the purpose, do not react with discomfort, instead behave proactively and give them credit for serving the purpose.

(Photo Credit: Zest-pk’s Flickr photostream )

(The above list is by no means complete – Please share any further tips which you are using to can empower your people via comments)

See Also:

1. 25 Ways to Motivate Your People Without Giving Financial Rewards!
2. Best Tips on Running an Effective Meeting
3. Four Causes Of Poor Performance (And What You Can Do About Some Of Those)
4. Who Else Wants The Best Out Of The Team 51
5. Seven Tips To Deal With Rationalization
6. Seven Habits Of Highly Ineffective People
7. Twelve Traits of Dependable Project Managers