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!
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.
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.
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.
Tools for Developing Your Team
If a manager has too many weak spots in the talent of the team, the ability to empower the team members to independently execute the project is impaired. Assignments fall behind schedule or stretch out because the needed skills or knowledge are not in place when needed. To successfully execute important projects, hiring talented people, and increasing the talents of existing staff are most important.
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.
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.
Tips for Effective Time Management
After studying and analyzing how time is spent, why time is wasted, and where time is wasted you need to decide about the changes required for effective utilization of time. For this purpose, a large number of remedial measures can be taken by you. The first and foremost determinant of a planned and purposeful utilization of time is to develop consciousness of the value of time at all levels of the organization. Planning, goal setting, and defining priorities are concerns to addressed immediately.
Many people think communication is easy. It is said that communication can never be a hundred percent complete. Many factors are involved in the process of communication and something can always go wrong with one or more of these. It becomes difficult and complex when we put barriers in communication. Recognize barriers to interpersonal communication and examine specific strategies for overcoming those barriers.
Time management is the process of planning and exercising conscious control of time spent on specific activities, especially to increase effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity. The best time management techniques improve the ways you work. Time management refers to managing time effectively so that the right time is allocated to the right activity. Learn more about the five steps for effective time management viz. study, identify, analyze, decide, and implement.
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.
How often do you have a plan for how you are going to spend your day but you aren't able to complete the tasks on your plan because of unimportant tasks, interruptions, or your own procrastination? Wouldn't it be great to be able to manage your schedule and your time while avoiding, or at least controlling, these time stealers? Learn the strategies to manage your schedule while still handling interruptions and demands on your time.
Have you ever noticed how we express ourselves or interact with each other? Have you ever wondered what communication is and what role it plays in our lives? One may wonder if communication is so omnipresent and integral to our lives, why study communication at all? We need to study communication because it is a complex process that consists of many elements and is also beset with a number of barriers and there is a need to remove the barriers so that the communication process is effective.
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.
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