Is Your Level of Trust Empowering?

Empowerment is about giving your front-line employees the authority to act in the company's best interest in achieving company outcomes and strategic goals. Front-line employees see 80 percent of all opportunities for improvement as they are the ones who are ‘hands on’ in your processes, vendors, systems and customers.   They have a clear focus on what works and what does not work in your company.  Leadership is often too far removed from the process to have that same level of focus and understanding regarding the job at hand.  In addition, your leaders may be too busy putting out fires or strained in terms of resources to have the time to proactively think about ideas that will achieve desired outcomes and strategic goals.  To add to the complexity, leadership often does not effectively communicate goals down to the front-lines, so what your employees think leadership is seeking is often different than what leadership is really seeking.  When this disconnect and miscommunication happens, a lack of trust occurs between your employees and leaders that is hard to rebuild.  Lack of trust is the enemy of empowerment.  Employees are then not fully engaged with or invested in their work and your leadership team wonders how to motivate them?

For empowerment to occur and ideas to flourish, bi-directional trust must occur.  Employees must trust leadership if they are to come forward with their ideas and leaders must trust that employees are capable of implementing the ideas they come up with.  It can be difficult to give up control on the part of leadership team and to trust your employees to support and achieve organizational goals and desired results, once they are communicated to employees effectively.  Once employees see that they are authorized to implement their ideas, they engage with your culture and ask what they can do to demonstrate best practices to achieve your company’s outcomes and strategic goals.  Empowered and actively invested employees make better decisions and implement them more successfully.

Idea Share Tip of the Month!

Employees give in ideas based on intrinsic motivation – not for rewards or money.  They want to see their ideas being used and most of the time ideas come about because they want to make their job easier or better.

Frame of Mind Consulting understands the unique DNA of your organization, which is necessary to turn any organization into one capable of leveraging the full idea potential of its employees. Would you like to drive connectivity and ownership throughout your company?  Contact Page at (860) 559-7942 to set up your complimentary consultation during which you will receive some invaluable tips that you can apply to your business right away.