7 Characteristics of Empowering Leadership to Create a Supportive Work Environment

Empowering leadership is a leadership style that supports and develops everyone in the company. Leaders must be able to convey the company's vision, improve their team's skills, and ensure that everyone's opinions are equally important.

Empowering leadership is not just a philosophy or leadership style, but a skill that must be learned and developed continuously. A leader may be able to convey the company's vision, but not know how to support the development of the people in his team.

Therefore, here is a complete explanation of empowering leadership, from characteristics to how to develop it, to help you develop this skill.

Understanding Empowering Leadership

Empowering leadership is a leadership style and skill that prioritizes support for everyone in the company to be able to work independently, without strict supervision or even micromanaging from the leader.

Although employees are supported to work independently, leaders still play an active role in providing guidance, direction, and appreciation.

Some examples of empowering leadership are:

• Showing reports and evidence of employee work results that play a role in the company's main targets.
• Creating opportunities for development, both in terms of personal skillsets related to work and collaboration between teams.
• Provide opportunities for employees to be involved in brainstorming to make big decisions.
• Provide appreciation for employee work results and the impacts they have.
• Praise their best abilities or skills, while providing direction on skills that need to be developed further.

Benefits of Empowering Leadership

Reporting from Managing Life at Work, some of the benefits of empowering leadership that can be felt by leaders, employees, and companies include:

1. An effective way to face the challenges of today's work world, as well as a tool to motivate modern workers.
2. Encourage employees to have a sense of ownership of the company's vision.
3. Help leaders make decisions related to the company and the employee's own targets.
4. Help leaders see different perspectives to ensure a feeling that they are heard and that there is justice.
5. Eliminate hierarchies and gaps that have the potential to create a negative work environment.
6. Improve the quality of work and employee self-confidence, which has the potential to create mental health for each individual.
7. Become a stepping stone and valuable knowledge for employees who want to have a career path to become managers.

Characteristics of Empowering Leadership

To be able to empower or support and provide direction for employees, you must begin to master the characteristics of empowering leadership. Leapsome describes its characteristics as follows:

Prioritize communication and transparency

By having good communication skills and transparency in conveying messages, you can build mutual trust, accept employee opinions, and ensure everyone knows what the company's targets and expectations are.

You can also invite employees to communicate openly to get their views or input.

Delegate tasks with a purpose

You must be able to delegate tasks based on each employee's abilities and know whether the task can help their development and fulfill their aspirations.

This also means that you give employees full authority to make decisions when completing their tasks. Of course, you still have to answer questions and provide direction when needed.

Involve employees in decision making

You also have to make sure they are involved in making decisions. Especially during the planning phase, make sure you listen to and analyze their input.

Give them the opportunity to collaborate deeply with other teams. Make sure they also come to you for direction or guidance in explaining their tasks to others.

Overcome obstacles to drive success

Make sure you understand what difficulties and obstacles employees face in completing their tasks. Then, help them to overcome these obstacles so they can complete the task well.

Examples may include inefficient business processes with other teams or clients, or personal issues that affect their performance.

Guiding and directing

As previously explained, employees can work independently, but you as a leader must still guide and direct them when needed. You must create a work environment or team where open communication occurs and every view or complaint is heard well.

Creating opportunities for growth

Set aside time for discussion sessions, Q&A sessions, and training to ensure employees can perform tasks independently and effectively. Not everyone will be able to complete new tasks well.

So, the leader's job is to continue to provide training without having to control the entire process of completing the task.

Praise employee contributions and impacts

When employees understand their contributions and impacts on the main goals of the business, they will feel confident and proud of their own performance.

The way to do this is to celebrate joint or individual achievements, give open appreciation, and support their work progress.

How to Develop Empowering Leadership

1. Improve active listening skills.
2. Prioritize open communication.
3. Create boundaries when to help and direct.
4. Build a good communication structure during check-ins, meetings, or 1-on-1 sessions.
5. Focus on the results, don't worry too much about the process.
6. Create brainstorming sessions to ensure all employees are involved and have opinions.
7. Train yourself to provide constructive criticism.
8. Create realistic goals or targets, and conduct performance reviews.

That's a complete explanation of empowering leadership, starting from examples, characteristics, to how to develop it. Being a leader is not easy, you still have to support employees, while still ensuring the company's vision and mission are achieved.

Therefore, by developing empowering leadership, you can lead a team that is always independent and responsible, in order to achieve the company's big mission.

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You will learn important aspects of leadership, such as self-awareness, self-management, and team management directly from experts and industry experts.
Interested? Register now and learn to become a leader who leads employees and businesses to success!