Leadership, Power and Empowerment
What leaders should really be doing if they want to empower people, and five coaching questions that help
Actually, I don’t really believe you can empower anybody else, I think they have to do it for themselves. If you’re lucky as a leader, there are times when you might just be able to create the conditions that make it possible for someone to empower themselves.
I love the quote in the picture above. For me, it says almost everything about how leaders should go about creating those conditions – give away your own power.
I reckon there are two crucial ways that leaders ought to be giving away their power, if they do want others to empower themselves:
- Give people “Agency” – that is, the ability to take action or exert power
- Give people “Choice of Attention” – that is, the freedom to decide where and how they direct their focus and efforts.
I’ve done plenty of leadership roles myself and I can tell you, when things really matter, when the outcome is an important one or when there are big things at risk, giving away power in those two ways can be absolutely terrifying!
It’s also the only way to absolutely get the best out of others, to stop feeling that you’re the only one who works at 100% and to grow beyond the limits of your own abilities.
If you’re a leader who would like to begin giving away more of your own power, so that you can get the absolute best from the people who work with you, have a ponder on these coaching questions:
- Where could you give people more Agency and Choice of Attention straight away, without having to really worry too much about it?
- What would be the benefits to you and your organisation, if the people around you started to be more self-empowered?
- If you did give away some more of your power and it works, it gets the results you want, how would you feel about that?
- What’s your greatest fear about giving away your power, about giving people more Agency and more Choice of Attention – what frightens you about that?
- Thinking about the fears you identified in that previous question, what kind of new, additional or different kind of power do YOU need, so that those fears evaporate or turn out to be groundless?