Your Leadership Link by Cullen S. Gibson, Vice President
Things You Can offer Employees That are Better than a Raise
Supportive Management
Ways to Be an Empowering Boss
Below is a list of tips to help leaders on how to be a supportive and empowering boss. Empowered employees will have great ideas or perspectives on tasks you may not have asked them to perform. They will put their own signatures on excellence.
- Trust your employees to come up with answers.
- Manage your reactions when you yield, and they crash.
- Focus on what they can do differently next time around, rather than using the rearview-mirror approach of what they should have done.
- Serve your employees.
- Be a resource to them. Yielding doesn’t mean you take the next exit.
- See them as colleagues, not just subordinates.
- Working side by side with your employees will strengthen your relationships and increase their respect for you.
- Listen to and use their ideas.
- Employees tend to withhold their ideas and they take less initiative to make improvement when decisions are made without their input.
- Stop micromanaging.
- Stop looking over your employees’ shoulders. Ask them what level of inspection, critique, or control they want you to use as you manage them.
- Give the spotlight away.
- This may be the toughest of all. As the hero, you may have received applause from your employees, and they may have credited you with the team’s success. Share the stage! Ironically, your stock will go up with your employees as you increasingly give them room to perform.
This series been derived from the book “Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em: Getting Good People to Stay” authored by Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans.