Field Notes

Empowerment is a leadership practice with teeth. 

For more than 50 years, the idea of giving team members more authority, ownership, and control over how they achieve individual and team goals has steadily gained more currency. Organizations and leaders that value collaboration, full engagement, and buy-in to team strategy have increasingly emphasized empowerment to get the job done. 

Research over decades continues to confirm that allowing team members to share in decision-making and act independently to achieve team goals leads to greater motivation, productivity, satisfaction, and commitment. 

Empowering team members is what good leaders do. 

Given the many benefits of empowering others, the downside of this practice is not talked about much. The best leaders empower the right people at the right time, but not everyone is ready to be empowered. 

In fact, empowering team members can actually be the wrong call in many instances. Empowering people who are not ready for it is a recipe for frustration, dissatisfaction, and disappointment for everyone involved. Knowing when to empower others and when not to is a critical instinct good leaders must develop. 

While stretching, challenging, and growing team members with tough assignments that are beyond their comfort zone is a great way to increase their long-term confidence and skills, there are a set of conditions that suggest when empowerment is not the best call. 

Here’s a short list of factors that should give leaders pause and direct them away from empowering a given team member at the present moment: 

• Their inexperience almost guarantees failure or mishap. The assignment isn’t a stretch, but a bear trap of misfortune given their lack of skills and inexperience.  
• They don’t yet hold the values that should guide their choices and decisions. Without those values, they will likely make poor calls and choices. 
• The team member is disorganized and easily lost when too many tasks are involved in achieving an assignment. Being easily overwhelmed in everyday assignments suggests they are not ready for more responsibility. 
• They have a proven record of underperformance and poor decision-making when working independently. Some team members need more structure and support and would flounder without it. 
• The team member has a deep need to please people more than to create great outcomes. When given more responsibility, people pleasers have a very difficult time working without direction because they take the path others want them to. 

There are certainly other warning flag factors and conditions surrounding empowerment, but these are the most common. 

Even though empowerment is a windfall best practice that grows talent and tremendously benefits organizations and leaders, it is not a magic bullet that works in every situation. The best leaders empower others when they are ready or near ready for it, and not a moment before.