Empowerment - Managing an Empowered Team

Managing a team of productive, empowered individuals does not just happen by chance. In any team, the role of a leader is to foster a supportive, nurturing environment that responds to the needs of their team. This self-assessment will help to highlight areas where you might be able to improve your approach.

It may also be useful to get members of your team to review your responses as a means of collecting upward feedback on your abilities.

Task

1. Read through the statements in the table attached and decide if they apply to you.

2. If they do, give some evidence to support your response.

Statement	Yes / No	If Yes, Support Evidence
I want every member of my team to become an expert in their field.
I am genuinely interested in allowing members of my team to develop and realise their full potential.
I accept that sometimes team members will make mistakes that are attributable to a lack of familiarity or expertise with an area of work. I accept both the risk and the responsibility for any potential mistakes.
I recognise that it is occasionally important for team members to have access to certain types of potentially sensitive information not normally available to them. I have informed my team of my attitude in this regard.
I regularly take time to listen to the concerns of individual team members.
I never hesitate to act on the team’s concerns.
I feel that formal performance reviews should be complemented by regular informal reviews.
Where I feel team members are not coping well with new responsibility, I am careful to temporarily withdraw that authority and arrange training to address the shortfall.
I continually look for ways in which I can transfer tasks and responsibilities to other members of my team to aid their development.
I understand the limitations of my team members. I have taken steps to ensure that they too are aware of their own boundaries and what training can be undertaken to expand their capabilities.

Your next steps

If there are some areas where you answered ‘No’ or could not come up with evidence to support a ‘Yes’ response, you may want to reflect further on your current practices and attitudes.

For the areas where you were able to answer ‘Yes’ and give supporting evidence:

• try to think of other examples that demonstrate an attitude that helps empower your team

• also, try to think of other ways that you could build on your strengths

• what further actions could you take to be even more supportive of your team’s empowerment?

• try discussing this with colleagues, your boss, or your team to get some more views of how people perceive your actions

#empowerment #confidence #peoplepower #communication #teamwork #collaboration