A lot can be said about companies that have been successful at this. One common denominator that it often comes down to is to EMPOWER your employees. This can sound like just a buzzword, but it’s a necessity to release people’s ability to make a difference, to not unnecessarily weigh them down with processes and procedures.
To illustrate, here’s a brilliant story of customer care from Southwest Airlines. A woman was on a plane about to take off when it turned around and went back to the gate, where she was asked to disembark the plane and go talk to the information desk. When she got there, she was told that her son (in another city than the one she was in or the one she was going to) had been in an accident and was in hospital. Needless to say, this was a very distressing message to get. But she was very grateful for the support the airline gave her. They certainly didn’t need to, but they got her onto a plane to take her to where her son was; they called her afterwards to check on how her son was doing. Seriously, wow!
This was clearly not just someone following procedures; this was the result of a person, or persons, thinking for themselves about trying to help a customer who was thrown into a difficult situation. They were empowered to do what was right. Talk about excellent customer experience.
AUTONOMY
As Daniel H. Pink so brilliantly outlined in his book ‘DRIVE: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us‘, intrinsic motivation (internally driven motivation, as opposed to external ‘carrot and stick’ motivation) is among a couple of other factors driven by autonomy.
And this makes a lot of sense. When we can act with a sense of autonomy, we feel in control of our situation; we feel empowered and spurred on to do our very best. We have been trusted to take responsibility and come up with solutions, and this inspires us to step forward and do our best.
No one wants to be told what to do. This is as true for children as adults. We want to be given the freedom to make the right choices. When we are trusted, that’s what happens.
KNOWLEDGE WORK NEEDS EMPOWERMENT
Jobs are increasingly knowledge jobs, where we are hired to think for a living; there is not just one way of doing things, so our ability to think critically and creatively is a necessity. And there is no way we can have processes and procedures for every single possible scenario we may encounter.
This is why we must create a culture of empowerment where each person is given the freedom to perform the job the best way they can. We must know and trust people to do the right thing.
REMOTE WORK REQUIRES EMPOWERMENT
Add to that the fact that more people are working remotely than before. Technology has enabled us to make it possible to work from anywhere and at any time. Some people work best early in the day, some later in the day. Assuming the job is not time constrained for service hours, for example, then why shouldn’t we help everyone do their best job their way as far as possible?
EMPOWERMENT, NOT ABANDONMENT
A small word of caution though: in a remote workplace in particular, empowerment mustn’t slip into a sense of abandonment. With greater empowerment, our conversations with our team and team members can and need to focus more on knowledge and experience exchange and creating new solutions that help fulfil our shared purpose.
Simply put, we just can’t afford to not empower those we work with. We need their motivation, their inspiration, their ideas and creativity – and their drive to do the right thing.
KNOWLEDGE WORK NEEDS EMPOWERMENT
Increasingly, organisations recognise that employees need the freedom to think for themselves in order to find solutions to new challenges. They need people’s creative, original, critical thinking.
This may impact how, where and when the work gets done. Not everyone does their best thinking at the same time and place. And it’s sometimes while not working that those important ‘aha’ moments are had, when thoughts fall into place and connect with each other to provide the solution you may have been looking for.
Increasingly, organisations recognise that employees need the freedom to think for themselves in order to find solutions to new challenges. They need people’s creative, original, critical thinking.
People often describe having their best and most creative thoughts about work while doing other things, like when they are out walking or when they are relaxing away from a work environment.
This all means that for ‘knowledge jobs’, we truly need to hire people based on their thinking capability and need to create the work setup that allows them to be at their best – individually and as part of a team – because collaborative behaviours matter greatly too.
As a leader, you need to balance individual and collective empowerment. As we often highlight, collaboration and collective intelligence are a necessity; we can achieve so much more when we bring all the clever minds and hearts together than when simply working independently side by side.
Accepting and appreciating diversity is realising that not everyone does their best thinking at the same time and place, so we need to be able to flex and adapt to allow for that.
Acknowledge that different styles create more innovative thinking.
And as output and outcomes are the guides for empowerment and autonomy, they also need to be expressed at a team level. What is it that the team are expected to deliver together? And therefore, how does the empowered work setup need to look? Applying the principle of empowerment, get your team to explore and decide together how that needs to look.
When it comes to great teams, thinking through how to use synchronous and asynchronous communication is important. With different time zones, people won’t be available at the same time, for example. How team communication is supposed to work needs to be carefully mapped out and agreed upon as part of the Team Charter. (for an example of how to build a Team Charter, please check our book “Leading Teams 10 Challenges: 10 Solutions”.
And having this kind of clarity drawn up and agreed upon in a Team Charter is particularly important when working remotely.
EMPOWERMENT IS FUELED BY TRUST
It’s not practical nor desirable (on anyone’s part) to micromanage people. From an employee’s perspective it can feel like you’re not being trusted, which is severely demotivating.
And from a leader’s perspective, it is time-consuming and demoralising and doesn’t allow people to take full responsibility.
Yes, to empower we need to dial up our trust in people. Ask yourself: what will make you fully trust someone to work in an empowered fashion? What needs to be in place? How will you communicate and follow up? And how can you do that while showing trust? How do you get your team members to take the lead and the ownership of keeping you up to date?
Effective empowerment should include building trust and finding ways to increase trust.
We are always working on increasing trust in our relationships at work and within our teams. There is a direct correlation between your behaviour as a leader and the level of trust with the people around you.
SOME RECOMMENDATIONS FOR CREATING TRUST
- Encourage your team members to talk by listening and showing interest
- Disclosure breeds disclosure, which leads to greater openness, so show courage and share more
- Spend time getting to know each other. Showing empathy while getting to know each other changes the relationships and opens up dialogue, a dialogue that might not have happened otherwise
- Keep your promises. Promise is an emotional word and hits you at an emotional level. There is nothing as powerful as a promise kept, being trustworthy. And a promise broken breaks trust. Either way, it affects trust at the core level
To be empowering to others, you need to feel empowered. There is a chain reaction with empowerment; what you feel and think about your own empowerment comes out in your behaviours and inspires others or demotivates them, depending on your behaviour.
How empowered do you feel, and what level of empowerment are you creating? Whatever it is, make a commitment to turn up the dial on empowerment right now. It will have a big impact.
“Giving employees great autonomy and flexibility allows people to feel independent and empowered while still feeling like a part of something bigger. This leads to happy, loyal employees with a rich quality of life, which in turn leads to an amazing culture.”
Larry English