Management 101: Empower Your Employees
Tachles Series: Benzi Ronen shares insight, anecdotes, and expert hacks for Israeli entrepreneurs looking to grow their business in the US.
Find out how to:
Define the value your business creates.
Empower your employees to become mini entrepreneurs.
Help employees actively measure the value they deliver.
Build an organization that creates and supports empowered employees
Nu, get to the point:
As a founder, I often find myself torn between the two major schools of thought on management.
The first: focus on desired outcomes and measurable deliverables. Most startups adhere to this “command and control” style of thinking — being able to identify and manage risks and track returns on investment provides a sense of certainty.
The second: focus on organizational habits. Get your methods right, and success naturally follows. Consulting firms are great at this; frameworks and processes are part of their intellectual property, enabling them to deliver predictable outcomes in any situation.
Both, however, share the same pitfall — as a founder, your sphere of influence only extends so far. You communicate your vision to your VPs and Directors...but what then?
A possible solution lies in empowering each and every employee to take ownership over the company narrative. Today’s world is in a constant state of change, where the speed of adaptability often determines which business comes out on top.
Empowering and trusting your employees to act independently — removing the need to constantly align within the managerial hierarchy — could become a model that drives success. Read on to transform your employees into change agents within your organization.
Hacks:
Define the Value of Your Business
Empowerment is key — but before you can empower anyone to do anything, you need to be crystal clear on your company’s narrative. First, outline precisely how you’re creating value for your customer; remember, “value” is different from your vision, mission, and annual objectives. For example, according to Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s value to customers lays in its ability to reduce prices, add variety, and increase convenience.
Break Things Down
Okay, so: value alignment is critical to empowerment, which is key. But how does this play out at the team level? How does it play out with an individual employee?
The next step is to work with your employees to define how their efforts contribute to the company’s value. Clarifying that link makes it infinitely easier for them to drive and measure their own processes and outputs — continuing with the Bezos example, if an Amazon employee’s personal activities aren’t increasing value along one of the aforementioned trajectories, they need to pivot their efforts accordingly.
A manager’s role then becomes to ensure that their team is equipped with all of the resources, tools, organizational support, and skills it needs to succeed. The following questions can help team members create their own roadmaps to success:
What’s the change you’re trying to create in the world?
What does the world look like before that change?
What does it look like after that change?
How will you know you’ve succeeded in making that change?
Slowly...but Surely
Don't hesitate to set boundaries at first — empowerment, and the trust it requires, is something that needs to be earned. Once an employee has their roadmap, they should work on defining their methods to achieve value creation. When they’re ready to share their process, try asking the following questions:
What’s your hypothesis?
How will you test and validate your hypothesis?
What will you do if your hypothesis is incorrect? (Which is okay!)
If your hypothesis is validated, what’s the next step? (Build in a path to increased responsibility.)
Redefine People Management
Once your employees are up and running, it’s important to stay connected with them and check-in along the way. One great way to do that: redefine your people managers as coaches. Mentorship is a proven framework for helping people discover and foster their own, unique superpowers — measure your managers’ success by how well they empower their reports to create value.
Good Luck!