How to Lead to Empowerment

The goal of running a business is to finely tune your leadership skills so that your employees have a strong desire to help grow the business.  Your goal is to lead the organization so that it will run without you, and the only way to do that is to make sure that your employees take ownership of what they do.

While there is no one step that will get you there, there are many little steps that will help you arrive.  One of those ways is to know where you’re going with your company and develop your leadership abilities around that vision.

Instill Your Vision

When you first hire an employee, it is highly likely that they will come on board for one reason: they need a job.  Most won’t apply at a company for the sole reason that they like the culture and agree with the mission and vision.  However, the right employee will be adaptable and able to grasp the concepts easily.

If you’re not sure of your vision, that’s an important step to take.  In fact, it starts long before your vision, it starts with why.  Take a little bit of time to refresh yourself on starting with why, and then develop your why, your mission, and your vision so you can instill that into your employees.

 

Empower your Employees

Now here’s the hard part.  Making sure that your employees take ownership of their work, so that they feel empowered and your vision is achieved.  To get there, you have to delicately balance management, leadership, and empowerment.

As the owner, CEO, president, or otherwise leader of the company, where the company goes is your vision.  One of the tasks you have to overcome is making sure that your employees take that vision on as their own.

In the beginning, you must tell them the vision.  The hard part is stepping back and letting them become empowered through self organization, so that your vision becomes their vision.  They are working toward your vision, but they are doing it their own way, so they feel empowered.

It doesn’t seem to make any sense.  It’s convoluted because as humans we think that when working toward someone else’s vision, we lose our empowerment.  But we can actually have the best of both worlds.

 

A Work in Progress

If this post seems to be a bit scattered, it’s because it is.  It’s a work in progress trying to put together the pieces of great leadership.

What most of it boils down to is having a clear why, a clear mission, and a clear vision.  Something that I have developed for Sery Content Development; and now I’m working on building things up so that we can serve more clients and provide even better service to everyone.