Empowering people, boost their performance
By: Ángel Costela
Tags: People Management, Agile Methodology, Startup

Empowering people, boost their performance

Here I will talk about how to get the best out of the people working in your team. You won’t only get better performance; people will be happier around you, too.

“boy standing on ladder reaching for the clouds” by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash

What is empowering people?

Empowering people is giving them the ability to take their own path and make decisions inside a project or an organisation. Human beings naturally tend to look for solutions, ideas and recognition from others for work they’ve done. Empowering your team will fulfil this need, meaning you’ll get extra value from them.

Emotional empowerment

Everybody has emotions; it’s a basic fact we can’t ignore in our personal or professional lives. First, we must think about our natural skills, talents and our own principles. What motivates us to wake up every morning? Which jobs do we do better than others and what fuels our engine? Once we have this information, we can build a realistic path adapted to the needs of our organisation and look for real targets to accomplish, providing extra value to our company.

After we’ve done this exercise, it’s great to help others to reach this knowledge. Organising several activities to get to know the concerns, skills and talents of team mates gives a bigger picture of what each person is able to bring to the organisation and which person is better suited to which tasks. Empowering these feelings, giving people the freedom to share ideas and solutions will boost the general performance of your team, because everybody will feel that they are an essential part of the success of the project. You’ll be surprised at the talented team that surrounds you and all the new possibilities that together you can offer to your company or project.

Organisational empowerment

It’s very important to have the opportunity and resources to influence inside the organisation, so that the already emotionally empowered team can impact positively in general results and projects. To reach this organisational empowerment, it’s essential to allow the team members to organise themselves in the way that fits them best. From this moment, it’s fundamental to measure the work done by quality and value, rather than by quantity. Another essential point is focusing teams in concrete projects so that they get involved easily and feel they are an important part of the organisation. They will see the direct impact of their work and they won’t get lost in an abstract process where seeing results gets more complicated.

To achieve this, avoid the old-fashioned hierarchy management style. This traditional way, also called management 1.0 or 2.0, usually sinks workers in just one specific part of the whole process, meaning that they miss the perspective and purpose of what they are doing. Instead, opening transversal communication and dialogues between all levels and teams is essential. It will give people a general overview of their job and how it affects others and the product, leading to happier and more fulfilled people.

Empowerment + cross-functional teams

Once you have your empowered team, including complementing roles inside it will increase their performance even more. Mixing in the same team people responsible for the product, developers, UXs and whoever else fits will give them the power of getting good solutions from different points of view. So you end up with a completely autonomous team that can agree on new decisions, bearing in mind all the aspects of the product. This brings value to the organisation without suffering the overhead of communication at different levels and avoiding infinite discussions between a lot of managers whose vision is narrower than a complete team’s with the perspectives of those different roles.

Real-life example

You have an empowered team with different roles. The guy in charge of the product has detected that your clients will love a new feature. The whole team meet together to discuss it. What happens next? In an old-fashioned organisation, the team members need to agree any next steps with their managers. Those managers may have a differing vision, which gives rise to a long process that consumes everybody’s time and energy but doesn’t add any value to the project. On the other hand, an empowered team with different roles and a wide vision of the project needs will provide a lot of ideas, how to do them and the best way to release the new feature. Furthermore, they will have the power to start this new functionality just after the meeting. Usually, they’ll quickly produce a prototype and agree on a strategy for testing and launching it. In this last approach, the team won’t suffer the communication overhead that implies agreeing things with upper levels of management and they’ll feel more engaged with their team and the project. This happens because each person’s job is essential to accomplishing the general objectives — they see the direct impact of their work in the results of the project.

Conclusions

Knowing the talents, skills and motivations of your team, giving them the power to organise themselves in a flat environment and allowing them to focus on concrete projects are powerful weapons, leading people to share their ideas and engage more with the organisation. Furthermore, you won’t waste a lot of energy in non-productive communications and processes across different levels of hierarchy. Not only will this increase performance, but it will also make people happier and the general working environment nicer. This is fundamental to retaining talent inside teams and improving both quality and staff engagement with the organisation.