Leader Empowerment

Many modern leaders strongly believe in empowerment. Yet leaders responsible for empowered self-organizing teams often struggle with defining their role and contribution. I’m often asked whether empowered people can be led or if you just get out of the way.

I can relate as early on in my career I knew what I didn’t want to be—authoritarian—and what I didn’t want to do—micromanage—but alternatives were scarce. I got by on leadership crumbs from role models and colleagues.

Last month’s edition of Connecting Dots used a high alpine expedition as a metaphor for a team of professionals that must work together to achieve a common innovation goal. Each is a leader in their domain. However, this presents challenges for the leader responsible for the team’s overall results of balancing freedom and control.

A team leader has formal authority granted by the expedition commissioner. They also have responsibility for the results and are dependent on experts in unknown situations. Experts hope to feel free and empowered yet also on task and collaborative working towards the shared goal. Individuals and a team at the same time.

Therefore, a team leader of an empowered team must develop a picture of their role and their leadership tasks. Tragically, many don’t have an opportunity or the material to do this work before heading up into high-risk and high-consequence terrain.

The trap is the common myth that “if everything is going well I have nothing to do because they are empowered and self-organizing. I’m only there if something goes wrong.”

If you are a follower of F1’s Drive to Survive imagine Toto Wolff or Christian Horner having that mindset. It would be the antithesis of who they are and how they behave. Like many innovation leaders, they both practice transformational leadership.

Transformational Leadership

Transformational Leadership is a set of pro-social behaviours that activate self-motivation in others towards a common goal. It is part of "New Genre Leadership" which is the behavioural school and evidence of how effective leadership happens.

New Genre is a young (20-30 years) but increasingly more realistic school of effectiveness than more common trait theory (100+ years) and process theory (50+ years).

In my Leadership Development work, Transformational Leadership works in tandem with Authentic Leadership—the ability to be self-aware of your motivations and able to voice them to others creating trust and comprehension.

Transformational Leadership is the gas and Authentic Leadership is the grease. Both are highly relevant in situations of change and innovation with uncertainty and anxiety being high.

The six practices of Transformational Leadership and why they are effective:

Question critical assumptions: Demonstrates to followers how to examine problems and situations critically, and challenges others to avoid making harmful assumptions
Words of affirmation: Follower develops through greater awareness of their strengths and how they can best contribute to the team
Seek different perspectives: Develops confidence in one’s creative thinking and problem-solving, and enhances the likelihood of finding the best solutions
Teaching life lessons: Signals the leaders’ experience as a valuable resource and serves as an efficient and effective teaching tactic
Introduce followers to developmental opportunity: Allows followers to develop through tailored learning opportunities, increasing their contribution potential
Present different perspectives: Illustrates to followers how to evaluate a problem or situation from multiple perspectives to determine the best outcome

Source

Theory to Practice

For many leaders, connecting the dots between these practices and their deeper behaviours and motivations provides great clarity. Most successful leaders of change and innovation already use these practices, yet don’t see them as the primary task of leading empowered teams.

Whereas, ineffective leaders try to compete for relevance as an expert or withdraw only helicoptering in for review milestones—eroding empowerment, self-motivation and ultimately performance. They see controlling actions and behaviours as the way forward when in fact they merely address their anxieties or inability to tolerate uncertainty.

Therefore, seeing Transformational Leadership practices as the ingredients that create the outcome of empowerment gives a team leader a very important and active role every step of the way. If you look closely at an empowered team producing extraordinary results, you’ll often find a transformational leader quietly doing their thing.

This maybe is why Drive to Survive is so compelling, we rarely get to see the behavioural processes and interactions that lead to the victories that are so familiar. It’s the journey that creates the transformational outcome driven by leaders like you.

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Learn more about how to develop more effective innovation leaders and cultures.

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