 So you've got too much to do to watch this video, we'll help you find a way to empower others so you can get some of that precious time back. Welcome back and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. All this month at Evil Genius Leadership we're talking about freedom and independence and today we're going to talk about how to free up some of your time to work on the things that are most important to you. We can do this through delegation and we've talked about delegating to others as a way of focusing our own effort as well as developing our team member skills. A concept that goes hand in hand with delegation is empowerment. Before we empower others to act for us there are a few things that we ought to think about. True empowerment is more than just handing out tasks or delegating work to other people. Empowering others is about providing resources they need to get the job done and the ability to make decisions about how to use those resources. So before we empower anybody in our team we want to consider what we're going to hold those team members accountable for and how much authority we're going to give them to make decisions. These two concepts go hand in hand because accountability without authority can result in ineffectiveness and authority without accountability leads to abuse. So just for fun let's build a checklist of the things you want to consider before we empower one of our team members to take on some more responsibility. First what is the task, project or responsibility we want them to take on? To what degree are we going to hold them accountable for the outcome? Does success or failure lie on their shoulders alone or will we still hold some accountability for the outcome? What resources will they need to accomplish what we're asking them to do? What decisions are we willing to let them make about using those resources themselves and are there any decisions we want to hold on to ourselves? How much autonomy are we willing to give them and how much oversight do we expect to provide? And finally how will we measure progress and determine if they're successful? So the answers to these questions depend a lot on the experience of the person you're empowering and the amount of trust you've developed between the two of you. If this is the first time you're delegating to this person and they've got low experience you may give them less autonomy to start with and hold more oversight of the process to yourself. This is great if you're trying to develop trust and also great if you're trying to develop young leaders on your team. The flip side of this is that the more authority and autonomy you hold back from this person the more time and effort you'll have to put in yourself to make sure that the job gets done and that limits your freedom and keeps you from working on the projects you think are the highest priority for your time. And these ideas are useful even if you're not the boss. If you're looking to take on more responsibility at work and convince your boss that you should be more empowered think through the questions we asked on our checklist and use the answers to make the case to your boss about why you should take on some new challenges. Empowering is a great way to develop young leaders on your team and it frees you up to focus on the bigger picture. Developing a strong sense of accountability among the members of your team will help them maximize their performance and accomplish their mission better than ever before. If you found this helpful don't forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter and join us every Friday at 10 a.m. Pacific time for a live interactive leadership discussion on BLAB. Click off on that globe to the right that'll get you to subscribe to our email list and that'll bring all of our content direct to your inbox. Thanks for watching I really appreciate it and remember the future is out there. Lead the way.