Empowerment
Empowering others is a conscious choice in how you approach the people you work with. When you apply empowerment, the individual employee helps define the challenge, the method, and the goal. Your role is to reflect, share knowledge, and facilitate empowerment.
In the midst of a pandemic like COVID-19, change and development might not be at the top of the agenda. However, the opposite of having the power to act is powerlessness – the feeling of lacking control and opportunity. Things tend to slip through our fingers when we don’t feel that we have the power.
Three core elements to focus on when empowering your remote employees are time, trust, and belief. And this is also an empowerment of you!
Empowerment means having the strength to act independently. The purpose of empowerment is to enable your employees to gain the power to act in their own domain and with their own authority.
It’s not power over others, but rather power to the capacity to create both small and significant changes.
In this way, empowerment closely aligns with self-leadership.
Time
To create meaningful empowerment at a distance aimed at strengthening and supporting your employees, it’s important to take time for your own reflection. As leaders, we often focus outward on our employees, feeling the need to instantly respond to questions and solve problems. We receive a lot of input.
It can be difficult to take time for yourself and to give your employees the time to think things through. When starting a process or project, agree to take a “pause for thought” and come back to it later. Depending on the situation, that pause might be five minutes, the next day, or next week. But define the purpose of the reflection—what exactly needs deeper thought. Without that, you may lose control rather than find the best way to move forward empowered in your project.
Time for reflection is time well spent for your employees to understand their working boundaries and for your leadership to appear clearer and more intentional.
Take a moment to ask yourself: How can your employees see or feel that you are empowered? How do others experience your sense of having the power to make a difference?
Trust in one another
When your behavior is balanced, thoughtful, and clear, you’re much more likely to earn your employees’ trust.
Trust and communication go hand in hand, even in a time where online communication makes us feel less present. It would be easy to simply say, “communicate more clearly.” But instead, here are a few practical ideas drawn from other leaders’ experiences:
- Say it, write it, share it! We need to communicate more to reassure employees of their mandate when working remotely. At the same time, write down the most important points for the employee and other relevant parties. Sharing fosters recognition and pride, as results and good processes are spread internally and even on platforms like LinkedIn.
- Ask directly about their mood! Things may be tough (let’s just say it). But as a leader, you need to show that you’re present with your employee – even through difficult tasks. Our moods can swing like the momentum in a handball game, and sometimes we need help to tackle one challenge at a time. Ask about the hard parts but also make a habit of asking what’s easier than before, which lessons can be shared, and what’s great right now. Find those cracks where they feel, or can regain, the power to make a difference.
- It’s never too late! If you haven’t yet had one-on-one conversations with your employees about what motivates them, it’s not too late. It’s always a good time to discover how you can empower them.
Trust requires learning. It can arise in an instant—and vanish just as quickly. To build and maintain trust, talk about its impact, or the lack of it, in your collaboration and what adjustments might be needed.
Take a moment to ask yourself: How does it feel to be met with trust?
Believe in the future
As a leader, you must instill belief. At the same time, you need to balance that optimism so it doesn’t lead to disappointment. In times of uncertainty, it can be difficult to define clear goals and structures. But believing that you will emerge stronger on the other side doesn’t require a fixed end date for the pandemic. Instead, it brings hope for the future and faith that what your team and organization are doing makes a difference.
Feel empowered to do more of what brings energy and value through belief and hope. Share what gives you that feeling, and help inspire your employees.
Take a moment to ask yourself: Where do you find joy? And can you use that feeling to further empower your employees?
From the COVID-19 pandemic, we know that remote work affects employees differently. For example, 48% felt they had good structure in their workday, and 59% accomplished what they set out to do. But some employees did not share that experience.
