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.
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