Growth Insider

Three Surprising Qualities of Empowering Leaders

leadership

Empowerment begins within

We all know how important it is to empower the people in our organization. As leaders, it’s our job to recognize areas of strength and foster the growth of others. This increases productivity and job satisfaction. It helps sustain work environments that are positive for everyone.

But what does being an empowering leader mean from the other side of the equation? What do empowering leaders need to do for themselves? It’s a fresh perspective worth a closer look. Don’t be surprised if you meet resistance. Casting a fresh eye on what you need to do for yourself could mean letting go of long-held assumptions about positions of control.

Challenges to empowerment

Seventy-five-year-old John Timpson has been empowering the people who work for him for decades. He’s chairman and owner of Timpson, a successful shoe repair chain with more than a thousand shops in the United Kingdom.

He follows a philosophy called upside-down management. Take a look at an organization chart for his business and you’ll see the sales staff at the top with management at the bottom. The idea behind this structure is simple. In his stores, sales staff focus on customer satisfaction and they’re trusted to use their own initiative to make that happen.

When John Timpson began to use this approach in his organization, it didn’t work as well as he hoped. Over time, he discovered two main obstacles. The first obstacle won’t surprise you. To have an empowered workforce, you must hire the right people. Empowerment only works when it’s given to people who are self-motivated and positive.

The second obstacle is more interesting. John Timpson found that middle management was resistant. He told them to run their teams any way they liked, but to not issue orders. They were reluctant to let go of control. They didn’t see how they could be accountable for activities they didn’t delegate.

Being an empowering leader requires a mind-shift from within. It took a while for that mind-shift to happen with middle management at Timpson’s stores. But once it did, the company thrived. Middle management came to understand they were empowered, but it was a power they gave to others.

The mind-shift from within

John C. Maxwell talks about this in “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership”. He calls it the Law of Empowerment. As he explains, our attitude and inner strengths as leaders enable us to empower others. These are attitudes and inner strengths we can nurture within ourselves.

Here are a few ideas on how you can nurture the empowering leader within:

Make yourself dispensable. From a young age, we’re encouraged to make ourselves useful. We don’t like to think that others can do well without our direct input. But empowering leaders turn that idea on its head. They hire the best people and trust them to do their job. If the team can function well without them, they take satisfaction in knowing they have led them well.
Face change head on. It’s human nature to feel uncomfortable with change and try to avoid it. But if our values are deeply rooted, change is less threatening. Having deep values enables us to face change without fear and empower others to do the same. As Stephen Covey says, “People can’t live with change if there’s not a changeless core inside them. The key to the ability to change is a changeless sense of who you are about, and what you value.”
Let self-knowledge be your top priority. John Maxwell says, “Only secure leaders are able to give themselves away.” There could be no better way of explaining what it means to empower. Great leaders are able to give themselves away because they understand everything they have to offer. They know their skills, attitude and influence. People are drawn to their confidence.