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
-
Teams are part of the modern organizational culture. Whether you are a team leader or a team member, having a better understanding of how teams work, and being able to identify where the team is in the process, is a critical part of ensuring the team is ultimately successful. Start with the basics and understand what a team is and what role they play in an organization.
-
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?
-
Charisma is a certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men. Charismatic Leader gathers followers, through dint of personality and charm. Understand the meaning and concept of Charismatic Leadership and the qualities of a charismatic leader. Gain an understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of using charismatic leadership. Finally, explore the difference between charismatic and transformational leadership.
-
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.
-
Building Perfect Creative Team
One misconception around creativity is that creative act is essentially solitary. Most of the world's important inventions resulted not from the work of one lone genius, but from collaboration of a team with complementary skills. Managers should build teams with the ideal mix of traits to form a creative group and then establish the conditions that make creativity much more likely to occur.
-
Facilitative Leadership is all about involving the employees in the decision-making process at all levels enhancing their sense of ownership, responsibility, and motivation. Facilitative leadership style uses a number of indirect communication patterns to help the group reach consensus and build commitment for the decision taken. To be effective in modern organizations, managers need to become facilitative leaders, learn what it means to be a one.
-
Stress is an essential part of our life. No one can live without stress. Stress can be beneficial as well as harmful. Stress as a positive influence adds excitement and hope while as a negative influence it can result in destructive feelings, anger, and depression. Although the general orientation to stress is to consider unfavorable outcomes, yet one must have observed that stress experiences may also facilitate the development of effective and varied coping behavior, increased personal resources, and lead to a sense of competence in development. Stress at a moderate level is not only inevitable but may be useful for physical and mental well-being.
-
Listening is the foundation for good communication. It is also the hardest skill to master. Do you listen to confirm what you already know, or do you listen to explore and learn new things? How can we create receptive communication as a listener? The real art of listening involves awareness and sensitivity to the feelings of the speaker because it is at the feeling level that genuine connection, relationship, and healing occurs.
-
Team leadership theory is a recent leadership theory that does not discriminate between the leader and the other team members. The approach considers contributions from each team member to be critical for organizational success. This approach focused on the overall team effectiveness and team problems are diagnosed and action is taken to remediate weakness. This approach provides for taking corrective action when the leader deems necessary.
