Empower: Leading a High-Performing Team through Autonomy and Accountability

At the beginning of this article, I mentioned I want leaders to feel the same kind of confidence and trust in their teams, that they can even be gone and still know things are working as they should. This is where the last foundation, Empower, comes in, and much of what we’ve already built up at this point leads towards this. When the team is truly empowered, they take ownership of their roles to deliver results without micromanagement.

Leadership development is critical to ensuring your team grows in their roles. Studies have consistently shown that when employees are given autonomy, their adaptability, job satisfaction, and overall performances increase significantly (Tabiu, Pangil, & Othman, 2020; Fallman, Jutengren, & Dellve, 2019). This kind of empowerment helps your team up for success, allowing you to finally take a back seat and watch the organization take on a life of its own.

Empowering Your Team for High Performance

Four Seasons hotel chain has told its employees, “Do whatever you think is right in serving our customers.” In other words, they signal to their workers that they are trusted with the task and also given easy access to resources to make the task happen. The following are a few tips on how to empower your team members, and you will notice that some of these have already started happening with our previous foundations.

Leaders need to set clear role expectations and provide regular feedback loops to create an environment of autonomy and trust.

1. Have Clear Role Expectations: Clear roles are like having boundaries set, where freedom can be found within the bounds. Let’s say one member is in charge of increasing employee engagement by 30% and is given a budget to work with. Then, they are told to do anything within these bounds to hit the goal. This would allow them to feel empowered for the task.
   
   
2. Encourage Decision-Making: When your team members come to you for help, try not to solve all their problems for them. Instead, be a good leader of a team and ask them what they believe will be the best strategy to solve the problem. Leaders often fall into the trap of micro-managing. As a team leader, make yourself more of a provider of resources than a provider of how to make decisions.
   
   
3. Provide Regular Feedback Loops: Feedback loops are essential for team accountability. This is where regular meetings come in. These feedback loops help to ensure that team members stay aligned with their goals and make necessary adjustments along the way. When autonomy is paired with accountability, it increases job satisfaction and boosts performance (Han & Hong, 2019). Regular feedback is essential for improving your team's performance and ensuring everyone is aligned with the goals,
   
   
4. Offer Continuous Development: Already mentioned a few times in this article, development is a signifier of trust that your team-members are going to continue to grow in their expertise and roles and give them the chance to make decisions based on their learning.
   
   
5. Build a Trust-Based Culture: Trust is foundational to any great team. A good leader builds a culture of trust, where employees feel secure to take risks and make decisions. When team members feel empowered, they take more initiative and ownership of their tasks.
   
   

Systemizing Roles to Lead High-Performing Teams

I’ve seen many business coaching programs teach people how to systemize their business. This is great and so necessary! Where E5 stands out is that it takes into account all the foundations leading up to this point. Here’s how you can systemize effectively:

1. Define Key Accountabilities: Every job role should have no more than 5-6 key accountabilities, priorities that they alone own that is clear, and everyone is clear on. Defining these accountabilities is essential for the smooth functioning of your team and contributes significantly to the success of any organization.
   
   
2. Create Clear Processes: For each of these accountabilities, a document (or you might decide to use process capturing software) should capture all the steps taken to accomplish the task within your team. Ask your team members to quickly make these documents, and then on a weekly basis, slowly edit it until it reflects reality better. The test would be, if someone were to take over one of their tasks, would they be able to accomplish it with little questions, if steps were given? By documenting and regularly refining processes, you ensure your teams understand exactly how to perform their tasks. This clarity allows for smoother delegation and higher efficiency, ensuring tasks are completed effectively without key team members. This will allow members to delegate tasks if they are gone on vacation, train people, or find replacement when necessary.
   
   
3. Empower Ownership: Processes should be assigned ownership, which allows team members in charge of the process to have the autonomy to work on it and tweak it as they like. Without clear ownership, teams can't fully take responsibility for the outcomes and will struggle to function at their highest capacity.
   
   

Building a Leadership Pipeline for Sustainable Success

Leadership is only leadership if new leaders are made. Strong leadership is critical to ensuring that new leaders can step into roles effectively, allowing you to step back and focus on the strategic aspects or, for some, become the owner of the company rather than the operator.

This is equally true for your entire management team. As the business grows and gets more complex, you need to ensure you have the right mix of skills across your leadership pipeline. When developing and leading a high-performing team, new leaders must be raised, allowing you to step back and focus on the strategic aspects or, for some, become the owner of the company rather than the operator. This is equally true for your entire team.

As the business grows and get’s more complex, some will grow teams that take on aspects of their roles. Some times your main leadership team might change as members retire, move on, or recognize their skills are better used in the organization “lower” down on the hierarchy. With this in mind, your entire team must always think about upcoming talent they are developing to become at least capable of taking their roles. 

A few things to take into consideration when building up the leadership pipeline:

1. Values and Character matter more than competence. If you have someone highly skilled who does not fit value-wise with your team and organization, it will cause unnecessary internal conflict that decreases productivity. If someone is neither hard-working nor humble (able to see their own faults and learn), they may temporarily succeed and fold during hardship. Skill sets are important, but they can be learned. So make sure you choose leaders carefully by aligning value and character first. Other things to recognize is, is there clear understanding of the roles and is it a fit? Do they desire the role, and do they have the capacity for it?
   
   
2. Always be training new leaders through mentorship, and leadership training. This will ensure you have a steady pipeline of ready-to-lead employees that you can select from.
   
   

Let’s do a recap: At the beginning, we set the pace and tone for Execution for your team. We ensured that the individuals are Engaged in their work for higher productivity and longevity. We aligned everyone by collectively Envisioning the future together. Then we set the culture of Exploration by making innovation and sustainability a normal part of the annual cycle of the team. Finally, we Empowered everybody to own their parts and to continuously work on training new leaders. At this point, you will see not only the real financial results of a powerful team rowing in the same direction but also the benefit of proudly seeing a vision that no longer depends on one person but belongs to a group doing greater things than any individual can. 

Implementing the E5 Leadership Framework: Steps to Get Started

This was called a definitive guide, and it can be overwhelming. So, how do you make E5 a reality for your team? I have a diagnostic that has 25 items, 5 for each of the E foundations. I suggest getting an overall score from the diagnostic and seeing how you scored in each of the foundations. When I work with my clients, we start at the beginning and work our way down until each section can be scored at least 80% or above. So the first step is to diagnose, and you can do that right here.

Need help implementing this framework into your team? We have a program just for that, called the Empowered Leadership Intensive.

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