Seth Dobbs (he/him): Do you struggle to get your team driving forward motion? Do you keep feeling like you have to tell them what to do? Do you tell them how empowered they are, yet wonder why no one is taking action? Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs, and this is the Principle Driven Leadership Podcast where I share principles of leadership, along with examples of how to apply them to help make you be the best leader you can be.

These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader in building organizations and in coaching others to become leaders themselves. I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills. I think they’re essential for helping you achieve your best in whatever way you might be trying to make an impact.

And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results. And leadership is a journey one that more often than not, requires others to take on leadership roles to collectively support each other in creating forward motion. Empowering your next level leadership.

Your team is central to building that support. Empower such a commonly used word in organizations that it’s become nearly devoid of, meaning. Plenty of leaders say their teams are empowered, or at least they profess to want this to be the case for sure. Nobody really wants to say, well, no, I, I haven’t empowered my team.

But what does it really mean? Does it mean simply that you’ve given the people you lead permission to act? At its most trivial, it seems like empower means that you’ve just assigned some tasks at its worst. Well, I’ve talked about the early days of my career before, back in, I think episode four, and this is when I first heard the term Empower used in a professional environment.

And basically my manager told me he was empowering me and my teammates. And then there was lots of talk about how empowered we all were. However, we were told what projects we’d work on. We were told how to do the work. We were told when things had to be done. And then with that, my manager still went through the charade of giving us choices on what to work on without actually truly giving us choices.

In other words, we were anything but empowered. And it seemed to me at the time that empower meant what I now see is the worst use of the term, that it’s a method for singling out someone to blame when things go wrong. If you’re using empowered this way, setting up clear lines of blame, you’re not focused on creating durable results.

Setting up clarity for blaming is actually entrenching you in organizational inertia, not creating forward motion, not creating leaders empowerment really brings together much of what I’ve talked about this season, and it’s essential in creating leaders, in creating durable results and in building a sustainable team.

So what the heck is empowerment and how do you make it happen? Empowerment is the perception and reality of being enabled to make aligned decisions through clarity of outcomes and principles combined with the autonomy to actually act. So to parse that out into three key concepts, empowerment is having autonomy, having alignment.

And the perception and reality of those two first topics being true. So the first concept, autonomy. I previously introduced the principle create autonomy, but I wanna refine what autonomy means with respect to empowerment. Autonomy is the freedom to create and drive vision and to resolve problems that get in the way of that vision, the freedom to do that.

That means you as a leader, enabling the people you lead to leverage their experience, their expertise in service of the broader organizational outcomes. I’ve talked a lot about how a good vision creates forward motion in previous episodes, but this is really where it comes home, really takes effect when the people you lead take a hold of the vision and have the freedom to craft their own vision as a subset of that in support so that they can drive a smaller chunk of forward motion in support of you and the broader mission of the organization.

This helps them course correct early because you’ve put the power to do that into the hands that are closer to the action than you are, and so there’s a greater likelihood of them being able to keep things on track, keeping forward motion. Given your team autonomy also means they have at least some freedom to push back on you, or perhaps at least reach a good mutual agreement on how many outcomes they can take on, right?

The notion of taking on less lets you achieve more. You want your directs to be able to push back. This is how you know if your organization needs to grow. And if there’s outcomes that can’t be achieved with the team you have, you either need to change priorities, reshape your vision, or expand your team, but you can’t make those kinds of decisions if your team’s uncomfortable raising a hand that it’s too much if, if your team doesn’t feel enough autonomy or freedom to express themselves, you’re not gonna know this.

Autonomy is key to enabling people to thrive. It’s central to achieving a goal of empowerment, enabling your people to move things forward without constant oversight. But autonomy by itself is not enough, which brings us to concept two alignment. It’s great to have the freedom of autonomy, but it’s actually dangerous, even chaotic if you don’t create boundaries to everyone’s autonomy through alignment.

Alignment is the governance, the guardrails that connects autonomous leaders, and your vision is central to creating that alignment. It’s what provides the guardrails to your team. If you express your vision with a bias towards outcome, you create a broad set of goals that enables your team to understand what forward motion looks like.

This means even while each of your team members has some freedom in their roles and responsibilities, they’re gonna act in accordance with the outcomes in alignment with each other. This helps them face reality together and being able to see problems as they manifest. It keeps your team aligned around what is truly a problem and what isn’t, and gets them all able to agree if something is or isn’t through alignment.

This alignment also makes it easier to recognize conflict, to realign around solving a common problem rather than arguing about a solution. It’s challenging to say the least to get a group centered on a common problem statement without alignment on where you’re trying to go, and you can’t align people through requiring permission to take action or forgiveness for taking action.

Without permission, you can’t align people through to-do lists. You might be able to coordinate a team through to-do lists, as in sort of program them to execute activities that are interrelated and to the best of your ability designed to add up to something you think is important, but that’s not alignment, that isn’t being guided by a commonly well understood vision that isn’t unifying your team to the best of their abilities to collectively reach your combined ambitions.

Autonomy is the muscle of forward motion. Alignment is the connective tissue, the tendons that coordinate those muscles. So that brings us to concept three, perception versus reality. Understanding that you need both autonomy and alignment to reach empowerment should make it a lot easier to understand the perception and reality of empowerment.

I mentioned some of my early experiences at the start of this episode. I think my bosses back then really thought we were empowered even though we had almost no autonomy. And while some of the details have varied over the years, I still see this problem in so many organizations, this perception gap.

I’ve been in a room with various leadership teams who have declared that their teams are empowered, and again, I, I know a few leaders don’t wanna believe their teams are empowered. It’s one of the busiest of buzzwords. If your teams aren’t empowered, you’re definitely doing something wrong. But wishing doesn’t make it so, and perception isn’t necessarily reality because I’ve seen even executive leadership teams talk about how their people are empowered when in fact the people they lead seem to have no sense of that.

I’ve worked with some of those so-called empowered teams, and they feel their concerns are ignored. They fear taking action. They fear raising issues that their management doesn’t want to hear. Well, as far as I can tell, these teams are effectively empowered to do what their bosses want, which. It’s not empowerment.

Think instead about letting others get to right, giving the space to get things wrong. This is how the folks you lead will see the reality that they’re empowered, that they have the space to try to learn, to try again and grow, and ultimately to drive forward motion knowing that mistakes are met with support, not punishment.

If people see this, if they have the lived reality, that they have true autonomy and are given the guardrails of real alignment, they’ll not only perceive that they’re empowered, they truly will be. Any meaningful vision you might have, requires more than yourself to fully realize. The whole notion of a sustainable organization of creating leaders relies on an empowered organization.

If you’ve been following along all season, you’ll start to see that all of the leadership concepts I’ve discussed along the way are interrelated by definition, by necessity, leadership skills aren’t simply a bag full of unrelated tactics. Leadership skills are a holistic approach to achieve outcomes.

Now, developing any of these skills, embracing any of these principles, core or enabling makes a difference for sure, but growing them together in concert, understanding why they matter will make you the most successful you can be in whatever way you might wanna make an impact. Enablement is a key outcome for this season.

It’s a combination of not just becoming a leader yourself, but also of growing others to be leaders that is growing, others to be able to influence yet others to effectively create durable results. There’s lots of smaller outcomes from embracing learnings from each episode, and you know you’re getting better at all of them together when you see this true empowerment in your team.

And that empowerment comes from first true autonomy, the freedom to create and drive vision, and to resolve problems that get in the way of that vision. Second, real alignment through a clear, broader vision, defined through outcomes, and last, the perception and reality of having true autonomy and alignment.

Empowerment helps create durable results by enabling more people than just yourself to drive forward motion. And because of the opportunity for growth, it creates empowerment, helps create a sustainable organization that is a truly powerful impact of leadership. So do your team members perceive themselves to be autonomous?

Do they think they are aligned with the broader organization? How do you know that? What actions will you take today to confirm this? And what actions will you take today to create that better perception and a better truth that they are empowered? Thanks so much for joining me. Please subscribe and tell a friend if you liked it, and join me next time where I’m gonna wrap up this season by reflecting on the challenges of the leadership journey.