Empowering Your Team Members
From the Voices on Project Management Blog
by Cameron McGaughy,
Lynda Bourne, Kevin Korterud, Peter Tarhanidis, Conrado Morlan, Jen Skrabak, Mario Trentim, Christian Bisson, Yasmina Khelifi, Sree Rao, Soma Bhattacharya, Emily Luijbregts, David Wakeman, Ramiro Rodrigues, Wanda Curlee, Lenka Pincot, cyndee miller, Jorge Martin Valdes Garciatorres, Marat Oyvetsky
Voices on Project Management offers insights, tips, advice and personal stories from project managers in different regions and industries. The goal is to get you thinking, and spark a discussion. So, if you read something that you agree with--or even disagree with--leave a comment.
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by Dave Wakeman
Has your leadership style evolved to reflect the modern business environment?
Old leadership styles put a premium on command and control, which made sense when there weren’t so many specializations.
Now, our culture, and the way many of our projects are organized, requires that we are more collaborative and more focused on enabling our teams. Let’s call this “leadership by empowerment.”
Having fully engaged and empowered teams is now a key to project success.
If you are struggling with adopting this new leadership style, here are a few tips to help you build empowerment in your teams:
1. Focus on communication: With all of the tools at our disposal, you would think communication and information sharing would be easier than ever.
But it isn’t.
In most cases, it feels like our communications are hampered more than ever by all of the noise and demands from technology. But knowledge is empowerment and if you want to empower your team to maximize its impact, you need to renew your focus on communications and getting people the right information at the right time. You can do this by clearly spelling out the way that you will communicate with your team and how they should communicate back with you. You can create areas, tools and methods for accessing the most important information. A tool like Slack may be a way that you can better organize your information.
2. Allow your subject matter experts to be experts: In projects it is easy to lose focus on the fact that as the leader, you can’t know everything. This can cause project managers to want to dictate every action and every possible scenario to your team members, but that is a clear path to friction, delay and failure.
As the project manager, your job is to put your team of experts in a position to succeed. One way I do this is by setting outcome-based goals for my teams with clear check-in points so that I can understand the status of tasks and activities , but give my team members the power to do the work in a manner that they feel is best.
3. Provide continuous opportunities to learn and grow: We talk a lot about constant learning and development, but how much of that is just lip service? To help empower your teams, spend some time developing the skills that are truly going to help deliver better results for your organization (not just the ones that are going to help your team members learn something new).
You can do this by creating a training calendar or schedule that focuses on mission critical tasks, sharing best practices or interesting new ideas, or inviting in guest speakers.
Remember, your job is to use the tools you have at your disposal to make sure your leadership empowers your team to do the best work they can for you.
How do you empower your team members?
If you enjoyed this piece, you will really enjoy the weekly newsletter. It is my most personal and strategic content delivered each Sunday morning to your inbox. Make sure you never miss it! Sign up here or send me an email at [email protected]!
Posted
by
David Wakeman
on: September 21, 2016 12:03 PM |
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Comments (5)
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Provide continuous opportunities to learn and grow is the key to empowering your employees. You can make them learn new things by assigning new tasks or delegating the items. This may include communicating directly with customers or just making some commitments.
Karthik T
Senior Engineering Manager| Nike
Bangalore, Karnataka, India
Tobe Phelps
Director of Digital Experience| Central New Mexico Community College
Albuquerque, Nm, United States
There is so much to be learned here!
Simple and effective tips ..Dave
Right Authority for the right responsibility can produce wonderful results. When authority is denied,results are clearly impacted.
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