 How to empower employees to make decisions is one of the hardest tasks many managers face. I mean after all you've been promoted to the management ranks in part because you are a good decision maker. Yet your time each day to make decisions is limited. So why empower employees to make decisions? Well firstly you gain more time back in your day. Secondly, you can focus on the more value-adding activities of your role. Third, you increase employee engagement by up to three times. And fourth, you increase the work ethic and there is results ownership of your team. These are all really powerful reasons to empower your team members each directly helping you in your position as a manager or leader. So today, we're going to cover these seven actions to help empower your employees. Use these actions to help your company create and empower the managers and leaders of tomorrow while at the same time moving your career forward. My name is Jess Coles and I've had a 25-year management career in Corporate and house odd names through to SMEs. I know empowering team members to make decisions by getting the balance between staying out of their way and being available to coach provides amazing benefits to you and the team. Empowering employees is definitely worth the effort needed to achieve this. And if you're new to this channel enhance our training shares business and people management expertise to help you improve your performance and that of your team and business. And if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. The first action when planning how to empower employees to make decisions is to really embed the team or the functional goals. Teams are much more productive when everyone is moving towards common goals. Everyone's efforts and work are supportive of each other rather than some team members being counterproductive. When you have one person making decisions within a team, that person can keep the goals in mind when making those decisions, thus keeping the team moving overall in the same direction. When you empower multiple people to make decisions, even if the key decisions are made by one person, making sure everyone understands and accepts the common goals becomes a lot more important to maintain alignment of effort and work within the team. This moves everyone towards common goals. If you've already set your team goals, then steps to build awareness and buy in might include if firstly taking the team through the company strategy. Second, link the company strategy to the team goals. Third, explain the why and the impact of the team goals on achieving the company goals. Fourth, ask the team to plan projects to implement these goals. And if you've not set the team goals yet, the steps to create awareness and buy in might include if firstly take the team through the company strategy. Second, ask the employees how the team can contribute to achieving the strategy. Third, work with the team members to agree goals for the team. And fourth, persuade your manager or the management team to accept the goals created by your team. Getting the team involved and contributing to the goals themselves or projects and activities focused on achieving the goals will make the goals become theirs or at least partially theirs. Team ownership improves the chances of achieving the goals set. Don't allow the team goals to gather dust. Constantly bring them up in team meetings and in one-to-one meetings. Put them on the wall. Empower team members to track progress against a specific goal and get them to regularly report to the team. Create a competition or a game to keep everyone focused on achieving the goals. Use any methods or ideas you have to keep the goals front of mind for the team members. If you, their manager are focused on the team goals, then they will be too. The second action when planning how to empower employees to make decisions is define what decisions can be made by whom. Not all decisions are made equal. There are many different types of decisions from the low impact on the business and familiar choices to large impacts on the business and involving unclear right or wrong choices. So putting in place a clear framework to cover the decisions that can be made by each role is a key risk management tool for the company. And it also protects the individuals making the decisions within the frameworks agreed. Look at which person controls which areas and work out the scope and the level of decision making that would be appropriate for each person so they can do more of their roles without reference to you. The decisions typically delegated are those which are frequently repeated and have a relatively low impact on the company in isolation. When combined, the impact of many low impact decisions can get quite significant. Examples might include deciding on which option to use in managing a customer complaint or the permanent terms agreed with a supplier or the volume discount given to a potential customer. Capture the decisions in a framework document and get your manager sign off for this document. Then talk through the authority levels and scope of the team members decision making with each person on your team and then share the framework document. Don't forget to periodically check that team members are sticking within their authorities as set out within the documents. The third action when planning how to empower employees to make decisions is to share information. Information is power is a common saying and there's plenty of truth in it. Having the right information at the right time gives you a significantly better chance of making a good decision with a positive impact on the team and the company. Sharing information in reports or access to ERP systems or whatever holds the information gives the individual or group better tools to make decisions. Without the right information, they are just going to rely on their gut instinct or on a limited picture of what is happening. While good decisions can be made in this way, the best decisions are nearly always made in conjunction with the right information and the right insights on hand. Give your employees the information they need to make good decisions. This is absolutely in your interests and the business's interests. You can also use information as one of the tools to keep track of the decisions your employees are making and the impact of those decisions on the business. For example, the conversion rates from changes made on landing pages or from different adverts. Using data to track progress is a useful way for you and the person making the decisions to monitor performance and get early warnings of developing issues. Free availability of information helps everyone do their jobs better. The fourth way to empower employees to make decisions is to delegate problems, not tasks. As a manager or leader, delegating problems is brilliant, as it means you don't need to do the problem solving yourself. Solving problems requires thinking through the issues, coming up with the options to solve the problem, evaluating those options and then choosing the best one. Then you have the task of implementing a solution, typically a set of tasks to do. Most employees enjoy the challenge of working through these steps themselves and doing so gets them more engaged, motivated and keen on seeing the solution successfully implemented. If you're only going to delegate tasks, the problem solving has to be done by you, which takes up your time and does little to develop your employees. So why waste the talent you've worked hard to get into your team by treating them like robots? Look for opportunities to get your employees thinking and problem solving. This helps you directly by saving new time and energy you can put into more important or enjoyable areas of your role. The fifth action in how to empower employees to make decisions is to start small. There is risk in giving employees more decisions to make. They may make worse decisions than you. They may find the responsibility for making the decisions a challenge. They may lack confidence in their own decision-making ability and so on. So reduce the risk to you, the team and the business by delegating the smaller and easiest decisions to make to start with. Starting with the smaller decisions gives the individuals practice at decision-making and using their judgement. And assuming their decision-making is sound, move them on to decisions with a bigger and bigger impact over time. This progression keeps improving their decision-making skills. And I don't advise empowering your employee and then leaving them to their own devices. This deprives the individual of vital support and help to build their decision-making skills. This also deprives you of visibility of the decision-making process and the ability to avert poor decisions. Make the time to mentor and coach the individuals throughout the process of their decision-making. More on this in a sec. Do expect mistakes to be made. Mistakes are part of a healthy learning process. Coach the individual through these mistakes so they learn and don't repeat them. Do not blame them or criticise them for making mistakes if you want them to continue developing their decision-making skills. Start small and only move your employee on to bigger or tougher decisions when you feel they're ready. The sixth way to empower employees to make decisions is to resist the temptation to make their decisions for them. Your decision-making skills are likely to be better than those of your employees. You might also have access to a broader range of information and be involved in more discussions about business issues compared to your employees because of your position. Your employee might have responsibility to make decisions that you've faced many times before. All these factors make it very easy and very tempting to make the decision on behalf of your employee. Doing so is a very slippery slope to ensuring your employees don't make these decisions and your time is taking up making them instead. While this may make us, as managers feel, important on a personal level, it does little to help us, our employees or the business in the longer term. Remain disciplined and constantly redirect the decision back to the individual. Don't get sucked into making a decision on behalf of the individual. You know, imagine the situation one of your employees comes up to you and says, I'm struggling with what to do in this situation. How would you handle it? I mean, effectively, they are saying, I don't want to make the decision. Please, would you make the decision instead? Reply back to them with something like, you're in the best place to make this decision. What options are you considering? Keep using questions to redirect responsibility back to the individual until they make a decision. This is a coaching approach to providing support and guidance to the individual without taking away their responsibility. Ask questions and don't provide statements or opinions so you keep the decision making firmly in the employee's court. The seventh action in how to empower employees to make decisions is coach the decision maker. Using a coaching approach is great in that firstly, you can provide guidance and support to the individual making decision, which provides a set of guardrails, if you like, to the decision making process, reducing the business risk. Secondly, you get full visibility of each stage of the decision making process so you can intervene to head off bad choices if needed. Third, you help the individual develop good decision making skills, reducing the team's reliance on you to make decisions over time. And you get all of this without taking away the responsibility from the individual to make the decision. A coaching approach uses questions to get the other person thinking. Do not make statements or give your own opinions. For instance, if you spot a big issue with a particular option being considered, you could ask, you know, what would the impact of option C be on the cash flow of the company? IE, ask them a leading question to get them to explore the issues that you've spotted. Don't say, I don't think you should choose this option because this is an effect making a decision for them. The employee will learn more working through the issues themselves to hopefully arrive at the same conclusion you have. Keep asking questions to prompt the decision makers thinking. Keep practicing your coaching skills wherever possible so you build a stronger and more capable team. So in summary, there you have seven actions to take when planning how to empower employees to make decisions. Helping empower employees to make decisions is a great management and leadership training for them and very useful to enable you to move your career forward, too. The seven actions we've gone through are firstly, embed the team goals. Secondly, define what decisions will be made by whom. Third, share information openly. Fourth, delegate problems, not tasks. Fifth, start small. Sixth, resist making their decisions. And seven, coach the decision makers. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comment section below and I'll get back to you. Thanks very much for watching and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.