Empower Your Team to Succeed

Empower Your Team to Succeed
By Tracey Fieber

Running a successful small business is never a one-man job. Getting it off the ground and continuously elevated up to new heights requires a collection of skilled professionals following an accurately designed strategic plan. But even the most thought-out plans run into unexpected problems from time to time. This makes it crucial that you empower your team of professionals to make the decisions needed in order to keep the company’s progress on track.

Why Empowerment Is Key

No matter what industry or field you’re in, or how many people you have working in your company, empowering your employees has the potential to generate big results. Just a few of the different ways that empowering your team can help your business succeed include:

• Better use of human capital – The individuals you’re hiring for the various positions in your company are being chosen because of their skills and qualifications. Without empowering them to make decisions on their own, you’re effectively limiting your employees from using the full potential that makes them ideal for the job in the first place.

• Reduce leadership work load – You and the other leadership in your organization have plenty of things to worry about when it comes to planning for the future. Because of your many responsibilities, easily-performed duties shouldn’t be clogging up your list. Empowering your employees to make certain decisions without your approval frees you up to focus on your company’s growth instead of menial distractions.

• More pleasant work environment – The trust you show by empowering your employees can help build an open, creative work environment. Employees may feel more confident, promoting an all-around more pleasant environment in the office.

Ways to empower your team

There’s little doubt that team empowerment is beneficial in most companies, but how do you go about implementing it? Just a few of the helpful ways to empower your team are:

• Share news and information with them – One way that empowerment helps improve your business is that it gives your team the sense that their contributions matter. By keeping them up-to-date on important news and information, you’re reinforcing the company’s open and friendly ambiance.

• Give them authority – Providing your team with the authority to make certain decisions is the core of empowerment in most situations. It’s important to remember, however, that authority goes hand-in-hand with accountability, and empowerment shouldn’t mean free reign without oversight.

• Allow for mistakes and failures – With authority comes responsibility, and it’s important you’re team understands that. But mistakes will happen. As a business leader, your role is to acknowledge these failures and focus on how to improve in the future instead of dwelling on the past.

Empowerment can happen on any level of your organization, from phone support staff that interacts directly with your customers, to advertising professionals looking for better ways to grow your market share. As a company, empowering your employees helps to create a positive environment and more of a vested interest in results. As a leader, empowering your team allows you to focus more on the decisions that truly matter rather than the phone calls and emails that weigh down your efforts.

Tracey Fieber is the founder of TraceyFieber.com and the creator of The Secrets to Retirement Success System, the most complete one-on-one Retirement Transition training program for corporate executives and business owners in North America.