How Well Do You Empower Your Employees?

Test Your Empowerment Skills

Your belief in your team, and how you demonstrate it, impacts their belief in themselves. This means that actively empowering your team through building their trust, enabling stretch assignment opportunities, and creating psychological safety become mission critical as a manager.

We’ve used research from the Mind Tools Impact and Insights Team to create a 13-question assessment tool, to help you assess how well you empower your team.

Your Self-Assessment

Coming up are 13 questions that ask you about empowering your employees. To answer them, consider your experiences over the past three months.

Be as honest with yourself as you can. There are no right or wrong responses, and you’ll have a chance to review and change your answers before you submit them.

Look at the statements below and choose how much you agree with each by selecting the most appropriate answer.

When you have completed the diagnostic, press “Calculate my total.”

Your Result

Take a moment to reflect on your result. Does it surprise you, or confirm what you already knew? Think about what you’d like to focus on.

If your result shows that you’re not yet that confident about empowering employees, focus on building a greater awareness of what empowerment is, and how to put it into practice. This will help you start to develop your empowerment skills.

If you’re already able to empower your team, consider what you could do even better!

Let's Act

Having reflected on your score, pick one of the following areas to take action on in the next week or two:

• Consider how well your team members feel trusted to perform their roles, and are equipped to succeed. (See questions 1 and 2.)
• Do you provide support and, if necessary, remove roadblocks to ensure their success? (See questions 8 and 9.)
• Do you guide and inspire your team by identifying opportunities for them to stretch and grow? Are they able to identify these opportunities themselves? (See questions 10, 11, 12, and 13.)
  

Take Your Learning Further

Create a culture of empowerment

Encourage openness and honesty within your team about the purpose and benefits of changing to an empowered way of working, and be clear on how you enable that culture.

Guide and inspire your team

Identify when you might need to provide support and guidance upfront, in order to achieve empowerment. This will equip team members with the skills and tools necessary to tackle stretch goals or new responsibilities successfully. Check out our top tips for empowering your team for more.

Give feedback

Feedback has the power to unlock outstanding performance - delivering careful and regular feedback is key. Developing your skills in delivering feedback will not only contribute to individual empowerment, it will boost overall team performance.