Conventional wisdom says that the more autonomy employees have, the more engaged, happy, and motivated they are. However, if granted without proper planning, lack of structure can be a double-edged sword that degrades team morale and effectiveness.
What is a Delegative Leadership Style?
Employee autonomy is the key to the
For many employees, this leads to role conflict, role ambiguity, and other forms of workplace stress that have a lasting negative impact.
READ MORE: Are you Delegating Work to Your Full Potential?
If planned intentionally, giving your team the ability to use their talents freely enables you to maximize their productivity and engagement. The key is to provide employees with the structure and vision they need to remain goal-oriented without managing how they do their work.
Here’s how:
1) First, Be Sure Your Team is Ready for Delegative Leadership
One of the top reasons
But, don’t make this daunting for yourself: The training can be as simple as walking your team through a new process, instructing your team to take online courses, or creating videos of someone doing a task while sharing their thoughts aloud.
If you train your team, clearly explain how you will hold them accountable for implementing what you teach. Research shows that employees retain more information from training when they understand how they are expected to use it.
Remember, the worst thing you can do as a delegative leader is assign projects to teams that are ill-equipped to take them on.
Read more: Delegating Tasks: How Do I Know If I Should Delegate A Task Or Not?
2) Set Crystal Clear Objectives
Gallup found that giving employees clear expectations keeps them engaged. Without a clear sense of direction, employees often work somewhat aimlessly on a variety of tasks and get frustrated because they don’t know if what they’re doing is valuable.
At the start of projects, give your team a scope of work that clearly defines all of the deliverables they are expected to submit and when. To increase engagement, discuss the deliverables with your higher-ranked employees to incorporate their opinions about the project before finalizing expectations.
As a
3) Remind Your Employees That You are Proud of Them
One of the biggest complaints about the
According to Harvard Business Review contributors Teresa Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, making progress on meaningful projects is one of the most powerful drivers of employee motivation.
If planned intentionally, giving your team the ability to use their talents freely enables you to maximize their productivity and engagement. The key is to provide employees with the structure and vision they need to remain goal-oriented without managing how they do their work.
Even if you have a laissez-faire leadership approach and prefer to let your teamwork without interference, checking in on your team periodically is a simple way to acknowledge their progress and show you care.
Planning team meetings when deliverables are due is a great way to remind your team that you’re proud of them for the contributions they’ve made so far and to potentially incentivize them to continue their momentum towards the end goal.
4) Pivot Strategies, Not Processes
Following significant milestones, meet with your team to discuss if their results are in alignment with your project’s objectives. If not, this is the time to step in, see where they are struggling, and help them develop more effective solutions.
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After all, if you’ve given your team substantial time and resources to invest in a project, you can’t afford to wait until the end to realize the deliverables your team created fail to meet the project’s goals.
5) Host a Post-Mortem With Your Team
As a
A post-mortem is a meeting at the end of the project where everyone comes together to discuss the successes and failures of a project. It is an open meeting where attendees share their opinions about the quality of work, how the team cooperated and anything else relevant to the project.
Use this as a time to grow as a team. Inevitably, a lot of mistakes were made, and tensions arose. Post-mortems create a space where groups can unpack their experiences working together to learn how to be more cooperative and productive moving forward.
Listen carefully to the concerns people share and follow-up with solutions. Also, pay close attention to the actions and resources that enabled the team to achieve their greatest successes. From those comments, you can gain insights into what you need to support your team moving forward. By the end, you and your team will have a deeper understanding of how to effectively collaborate.
Remember, as a
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