Executive Podcast #331: The Power of Empowerment

Perry Holley:
Foreign. Welcome to the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast, where our goal is to help you increase your reputation as a leader, increase your ability to influence others, and increase your ability to fully engage your team to deliver remarkable results. Hi, I’m Perry Holley, a Maxwell leadership facilitator and coach.

Chris Goede:
And I’m Chris Goede, executive vice president. Welcome our. And thank you for joining. One of the things we want to talk about is there’s a big difference between empowerment and delegation. And I’m not sure everybody understands the word empowerment. And this is something Perry just told me a minute ago. He’s been studying a lot. This is what I love about this podcast.

Chris Goede:
If you’re listening to us and sharing with your team, this is just stuff that’s.

Perry Holley:
It’s real.

Chris Goede:
It is coming straight out of Perry’s learning, not Chris Perry’s learning. And so he’s actually working right now on some stuff around empowerment. And so we’re going to give it to you first. So before we get started, if you want to go to MaxwellLeadership.com/Podcast, click on this podcast. You can fill out a form there. You can download the learner guide. You can also ask a question or maybe you’re dealing with something real time that you want us to talk about here and kind of unpack. We promise not to share your name or the names of the team members that you may be struggling with that you’re talking about as we unpack this from a leadership perspective.

Chris Goede:
So, as I mentioned, today, we’re going to talk about the power of empowerment. This is a big word in leadership development.

Perry Holley:
Oh, throw it around. It’s fun to say.

Chris Goede:
It’s fun. Empowerment.

Perry Holley:
Yeah, it’s fun to say, I got it.

Chris Goede:
It’s hard to do, and I’m not sure people know how to do it.

Perry Holley:
This is what I’m learning as well. And I’ll tell you, I was coaching a CEO. He liked me and invited me to his company to do a full workshop, five levels, with his entire team. I was at a point toward the end of the day, and I said, well, by the way, what? And he had just come back in the room. So he had been out for a minute. He came back in. I said, what do you think about empowerment? And without even raising his hand, because you’re a CEO, you don’t raise your hand. He says.

Perry Holley:
He goes, got to be careful with empowerment. Gets you in a lot of trouble. They don’t know what they’re doing. It’s very dangerous, very risky, very. I go, dude, dude, calm down. I thought you know, wrong question for.

Chris Goede:
The wrong guy at the moment.

Perry Holley:
Yeah, yikes.

Chris Goede:
Yeah, yeah. That was one of those facilitation moments where you go, note to self, don’t, don’t do that again without knowing the answer first. Well, really it’s simply defined as empowering is giving your influence to others for the purpose of their personal growth or even organizational growth in a project or whatever it might be. And so you think about it as you kind of, you’re sharing your influence, your, your position, your power, hence empowerment. Right. The powers in the title with others so that you can invest in not only the organization or that project, but that individual that is then going to be able to function at their best. And in a way you’re, you’re resourcing them along this way of being able to step out of what their day to day activities are to be able to accomplish something. Yeah.

Perry Holley:
And it’s really about, you see the potential in others, you share your resources with them. You, you, you know, show them that you believe in them completely. You give them the opportunity to, to, to act on their own. Like you said, it can change the organization. It’s, it’s a win, win situation if done correctly. And when you see people empowered, it’s, it’s a beautiful thing. And I thought, and I, we come up in our conversation. But I just think about, do you, if you’re one of these leaders that likes to see things, see things work because of you, like you’re very important.

Perry Holley:
Yeah. You don’t need to do empowerment.

Chris Goede:
Yeah.

Perry Holley:
But if you would love to see things work without you so that you can be applying, doing the things that only you can do at a higher level, the strategy, the direction, working on the business instead of in the business, you need to empower. And I just, that to me is the biggest difference I’m seeing is leaders that cannot take their hands off because people are not empowered. Why, why are they not empowered? Well, either I didn’t empower them or they’re afraid to be empowered. So that’s kind of where a lot of this comes from.

Chris Goede:
I see it in teams and organizations when the leader leaves, whether the leader is promoted or whether he’s been, or she’s been dismissed, what happens after that often tells me how much empowering actually went on with that leader. And so it is no doubt you’re enabling others, you’re encouraging them, you’re equipping them. But I got to stop for just a minute because we, we teach on how to facilitate. Right. Tips. I got to come Back to this comment here. And I want to know, well, what did you do when you made that facilitation mistake and walked in? You didn’t know what to answer. And he goes, and it went differently than you thought it was going to go.

Chris Goede:
Talk, take us back to that room. What did you do in that room?

Perry Holley:
High level people. I thought it was going to go a much different direction. You know, I wanted to just boldly say it’s because you don’t know what you’re doing, but you can’t do that. So, But I thought about it. It was really a struggle that most of us have is that we, we hire people based on their strengths, we put them in a role and then we say you’re empowered. And they do come off the. He was right. They do come off the rails, they do make mistakes, they do get you in trouble, they do take unnecessary risk.

Perry Holley:
And so it’s that similar a lot to how I’d done things too. And I go, you know what, we’re doing it wrong. And so that’s why I really want this lesson today. What do you do if you really want to have an empowered force? And you made an interesting comment a minute ago. How do you know they’re not empowered? I asked that in the room a lot. So you did all this and how do you, how can you tell they are acting empowered? They don’t keep coming back to your office asking is this okay, what should I do? I’m thinking about doing this. What would you do? They don’t do any of that. They, they, they take the risk, they take the action and then they have the accountability which will come up in a moment.

Perry Holley:
But so let’s start with the, to become an empowered leader, I just think starts with this transparency of information is that you’ve. People cannot act in an empowered way if they don’t have the necessary information about what’s going on. You can’t keep people just tell them enough, only what they need to know. They need to know as much as you can have them know. So that I feel like I know what’s going on, I know the bigger picture, I know what we’re trying to accomplish. And I have your best interests at heart. Our best interests at heart. I’m going to make the best decisions.

Perry Holley:
I’m going to be empowered. I don’t need your permission to take my, and do my job and go out and make decisions and run my day autonomously doing my job if I don’t know what’s going on. I’m Going to be very suspect. I’m going to be very hold back. I’m going to keep checking with you. Is this okay? Is that okay?

Chris Goede:
Right.

Perry Holley:
No, you’ve got to. This communication has got to be the key starting point.

Chris Goede:
I like what you said about sharing ultimately as much as you possibly can share in your position. Here’s the deal. If I’m empowering somebody else, oftentimes I have more context behind previous decisions and information and where we are currently right now, that is very helpful, good or bad, in empowering them to whatever it is. When you do that, when you begin to share and open up, you’re going to gain their trust. And that’s going to be key to this empowerment thing, is being able. How do I quickly gain their trust if you don’t already have it, but even specifically, how do I gain their trust in this particular situation? You may have trust over an individual, but trust in handling this situation and we can’t expect other people. I think about, I’ve been around a long time at Maxwell Leadership and if I have somebody else that I just have information that would be very helpful for me to share in certain situations. So if I do not do that, they may not be able to act responsibly.

Perry Holley:
Do you find, do you ever find that you. Because you’re, you’re, you’re very close with all of the team, but do you just assume sometimes they have more information?

Chris Goede:
They do.

Perry Holley:
And why they didn’t act in a certain way. They didn’t know. You thought, oh my gosh, because you knew it.

Chris Goede:
That’s exactly right. Yeah. And not only do I find it where they keep coming back. And so I can sense to your point, a minute ago you said they keep coming, ask questions, I didn’t give enough information in front of it. The other part is then we get to the other side and we evaluate and I’m like, oh, that’s on me. Like I should have told you that that body was buried in that corner because I know that situation. And so we have to. To your point, we got to be transparent.

Chris Goede:
And when we do that, we’re going to gain their trust not not in just of the person, but of handling the situation. That’s the key part.

Perry Holley:
So just building off that trust. One of the things I noticed about people that empowered me was they practiced delegating. And I use the word practiced delegating. And John cracks me up when he writes about it. He says is delegating, not dumping. And generally I get in trouble if I’m just Throwing things over the wall, telling you to handle it. That’s not good. But I say practice delegating.

Perry Holley:
And delegation is built on a scale of trust. And so what they would do is they would give me, and you can look this up under five levels of delegation type of things. But they just said, hey, what would you do in this situation? And they wanted to see what I would do. I’m getting ready to take this action, but what would you do? And they want to hear my thinking. And then they say, hey, formulate an answer for this action, but don’t do it. Come back and tell me. And then they might say, formulate an action. And then if I approve it, I want you to go take the action and then come back and we’ll talk about it.

Perry Holley:
And then I want you to go ahead and formulate the action. Take the action, but then come back and tell me what you did.

Chris Goede:
Okay?

Perry Holley:
I want you to formulate the action, go take the action, and then go back to business. You don’t have to tell me what you did. That’s the ultimate level of trust, is that Perry, just handle it. But you don’t just start with Perry, just handle it. You start with, let me hear how you think. How would you do this? And you. He practiced with me. That built trust that I was.

Perry Holley:
That I had all the information, I was able to take the delegation and I was able to act on my own.

Chris Goede:
You have to be intentional about it, the process, right? Like I love that John says, it’s. It’s not called dumping, right? It’s. It’s. You got to walk them through a process to be able to get there. There’s got. It’s got to. It’s got to make sense. And what you’re worried about or what you’re focused on is the end in mind, the outcome of whatever the project is that you’re thinking about right now, that you can potentially get to a point to empowering somebody to be able to do it versus micromanaging them along the way.

Chris Goede:
I was just responding to you a minute ago about when we were talking about transparency of information. At times, I feel like when I don’t communicate properly, it feels like I’m micromanaging, but it’s not me leading the micromanagement. It’s them continuing to come back on the small details. And that’s when I go, oh, I didn’t do a really good job on the front end of that. And so there is intentionality behind this. Here’s the other thing. I wrote down a Couple of things, as Perry put this in my notes, it got me thinking, is that when you do this, I love what you said a minute ago. It is allowing us as leaders or for us as a team member to show our leader, our thinking.

Chris Goede:
Right. How are we making decisions? That is huge because we can then oftentimes see before and more than most of our team. And so we can see what’s going to happen when they get to that crossroad because of the decision making. I think it also, it builds collaboration in the team. It’s that conversation, it’s the dynamics. It’s. They’re getting behind the curtain of some situation and context and there’s. They’re getting to speak into, well, what about this? What do you think about that? The other thing is, is that it shows leadership support.

Chris Goede:
You are supporting them in what a role might be. Finally, don’t go through all of this process and learn how to empower them and empower them and without recognizing the effort that they’re putting behind.

Perry Holley:
Oh yeah.

Chris Goede:
Even if the outcome isn’t exactly what we wanted the first time. I’ve been around some leaders before where they go through that process and I felt empowered, thought I killed it. And yeah, that’s right. There was nothing, nothing said about it until the next project came and then we’re going to power you to do it again. So just be aware of that. You teach a lot. We were talking about this yesterday in a class with an organization about understanding the appreciation languages and some of the individuals, high level executives in the room going, yeah, man, for me it’s about words of affirmation. It’s just, hey, I saw you, you know, run that project and it had some, it, you know, it had some, some tough stuff on it and you did your best.

Chris Goede:
He’s like, that’s all I need. Right? And so just understanding that. But even when you’re empower somebody, I want to encourage you to recognize the efforts in all people.

Perry Holley:
The last thing I’ll add is that you mentioned about not micromanaging. It really is about if you’re empowering people, it requires a large dose of autonomy that they can do their job the way they best see to do it. You trust them with that. And the hard part about that is you have to allow for mistakes, that people are gonna make mistakes, they’re going to drop the ball. And that, that’s part of the process of empowerment is that we do the aar, the after action review. We check in, what did you learn? How could that have gone differently what should we have done differently? That also builds trust. But the fastest way I’ve seen to kill an empowerment environment is to micromanage. Just stay in everybody’s business and keep ask, you know, for, you know them to keep you informed about what’s going on.

Perry Holley:
They’re not going to, they’re just going to salute, stay mute and just plow on whatever you want them to do without. Without taking it on their own.

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Chris Goede:
Well, finally, we’ve talked a lot about empowerment and seems from a very positive aspect. Now listen, we can’t empower people without holding them accountable.

Perry Holley:
Accountability. Yeah.

Chris Goede:
And so being accountable, and I’m glad you put this in here because we have to make sure that we are, we’re holding them responsible, like we’re empowering them. It’s part of the leadership process that we’re taking them through. And part of that is just being accountable for the decisions and the consequences of it. Now, as a leader, you mean you may need to take some of it, like we mentioned earlier, an example with me of maybe not communicating properly, I’ll own some of that. But the individual team member, team member needs to feel the weight as well.

Perry Holley:
And that’s before you wrap up just the accountability. Sometimes it’s not who we blame when it goes wrong. So I empowered you, you messed it up. Now you’re accountable for who’s accountable for this mess. Accountability. And we had a podcast on this somewhere about it’s ownership that I just want to make sure that I’m watching you. Are you making a decision to overcome the obstacles, the circumstances? There’s always circumstances, but you’re overcoming whatever they were to demonstrate ownership. Did you do that? And how can I help you with that? So accountability says let’s come back and make sure.

Perry Holley:
Did you overcome circumstances or does something get in the way? And did you demonstrate ownership? Do I need to help you with that? And what do we learn? And now go forth and be empowered again. So I get. Sometimes I come out of an environment where accountability was, who do we beat up when it gets messed up? Yeah, don’t do that.

Chris Goede:
That’s not right now, when you’re, when you’re raising up, developing and empowering people. Let me just wrap up with this. We’ve talked about it a couple times. Perry started with it. The number one key behind the empowerment, the power of empowerment, is trust. That is the absolute key. And when you have trust, when they have trust in you, you have trust in them. It’s going to provide a foundation of confidence in them in the project.

Chris Goede:
Making decisions, collaborating with peers, instead of coming directly back to you, they’re going to have that. It’s going to strengthen the relationships inside the team. It’s going to strengthen the relationship with you and that individual. And then as we just wrapped up, it’s going to drive a culture of accountability. They’re going to know that every little task, every little project we’re working on, every KPI. While we may empower people through the process the right way, at the end of the day, you’re going to be held accountable to that because as a leader, we need to be responsible for those results.

Perry Holley:
Terrific. Well, thank you, Chris. And as a reminder, if you want to know more about this topic, get the Learner guide. Learn about our other offerings. If you want to leave a question or a comment, we love hearing from you. You can do all that at MaxwellLeadership.com/Podcast. We love hearing from you. Very grateful you spend this time with us today.

Perry Holley:
That’s all from the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast.

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