Empowered Execution: Tackling Leadership Uncertainty
Whether you’re a leader or have just been promoted into a leadership role, you’ll know that uncertainty is part of the job. But your ability to deal with that uncertainty is what will set you apart as an effective leader.
Empowered execution is not about efficiency. It’s about effectiveness. And it is the capacity to adapt to complexity and continuous change. Today’s article offers tips and strategies for handling uncertainty as a leader.
Joe LeBoeuf
A former West Point leadership instructor. He also taught at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University as a leadership professor of practice.
The following is an excerpt from an interview with Joe LeBoeuf, a former West Point leadership instructor. He also taught at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University as a leadership professor of practice.
Choose 'Good Leadership' over Traditional Leadership
Good means a lot of things:
it’s purposeful
it’s vision-based
it’s character-centric
it's value-driven
it’s focused on principles
Good leadership is about communicating intent, developing trust, and creating an environment that empowers people to achieve desired outcomes.
Be clear about your values, beliefs, and principles.
Tell people why they are in your group and why you are the right person to lead them.
Make your intentions known, and communicate what you expect of them.
Build a formidable team able to make critical decisions even in your absence.
You’ll miss some decision points if your team must wait for you to make the necessary decisions. In the current business environment, things are happening quickly, and it’s a climate that favors those who are quick to decide.
Get to know why members of your team might hesitate to act on their own. Are they scared of making mistakes? Maybe they don’t feel safe, or they don't know what to do.
The trick is to prepare them for intellectual readiness and the need to take reasonable risks so the organization avoids missing vital opportunities.
You don’t need to be present in every situation for those working under you to say, “Hey, this is the right thing; let me do it.”
Having staff constantly wait for your approval is like submitting a paper for publication and waiting six months for a response.
Don’t forget waiting comes with a risk issue—the risk of acting now versus the risk of waiting. And at the risk of waiting, you can miss an opportunity.
As a leader, you can’t make all decisions —others must make them on your behalf. So empower others and give them the tools and structures that will allow them to respond.
Delegation differs from empowerment.
Delegation is a transactional behavior where you assign specific tasks. You tell somebody, “I want you to do this task.” Maybe you were unavailable, so you gave it to somebody else.
Empowerment is a transformational behavior because it is intent-based and outcome-focused.
In an empowerment model, you provide broad limits within which your team should behave. And then you enable your people to execute missions to achieve those outcomes without direct supervision. With trust, they're going to do the right thing.
Yet good leadership requires effort to prepare and empower the team.
Think of how much work a coach does backstage. How many tactics and motivational speeches does he give his team? It’s crucial to remember that the coach does not play in the game with them. His role is to train the team beforehand, then trust them to win the game.
Empowerment means you prepare your people.
You can’t just wave a magic wand and tell them, “Hey, you're empowered.” It doesn't work that way.
Be aware of your leadership point of view.
If you’ve chosen to lead, if you’ve accepted a leadership role in an organization, then you must prepare to be that leader.
Becoming an effective leader means understanding your leadership style. How do you lead? A sincere answer will give you a clear direction for acting and what to do next.
Unfortunately, not all executives can express the goals of their leadership and their company’s vision. As a result, they can’t tell you how they lead.
Warren G. Bennis, in his book On Becoming a Leader, talks about self-awareness as the cornerstone of effective leadership.
To understand your leadership point of view, you should know the following:
what you expect of yourself
what you expect from your team, and
what good leadership looks like in your organization
Gaining this awareness will help you to understand your personal approach to leadership and how that style can be harnessed to the best effect within your organization.
Trust and cooperation enable your team to do more.
Pete DeMarco says, “leadership is a communication relationship-enabled life that creates trust and goodwill.”
Building a high-performing team requires trust and cooperation between the leader and their team members. This requires work.
Just as we’d be wary of dating someone on Tinder without an accurate profile picture, people are wary about trusting insincere leaders.
People need to trust one another to take the initiative. Otherwise, they won’t feel empowered.
Trust is the big issue when you read most of today's published leadership articles reveal that trust is a key issue for leaders. What is the effect on trust in a season of layoffs, for example? What will trust look like in a time of high demand when team members long for improved work-life balance?
Many leaders, institutions, and organizations have lost employee trust, and this needs to change for effective leadership. When there’s trust and cooperation, everyone works together in harmony to achieve a specific goal.
Be intentional.
Be clear about what the future looks like to those working with you. Explain what a successful outcome will be. Have a purpose: be able to articulate your leadership goal.
You have to examine your values and how these translate into behavioral principles. How do you lead? How does your behavior align with your values? Are those values and behaviors aligned with what the organization is asking you to do?
Once people understand the desired outcomes, as a leader, you need to help the team build the pathway to achieve those outcomes.
How? The first step is to create a culture that brings about an intentional leadership development system in your organization. The result of this is an increase in their readiness to be empowered.
For instance, say, “Erica, I want you to shoulder more responsibility. I understand you don’t have the skill set to take on more responsibility. However, I’ve got a program to help you develop those skills.”
And for a team member like Erica, if the culture is in place, it means senior leaders have created the right developmental conditions.
In that case, Erica might respond by saying, “If I can learn the right skill set, gain sufficient knowledge and abilities, it can empower me over time to take on more responsibility and do more on behalf of the senior leadership.
For leaders to get their teams to this place demands a very robust program of team development. People want to grow; they want to learn; you only have to create those conditions.
Inspire others by leading with your authentic self.
You can’t inspire others if you’re not authentic. To engender trust, people want authenticity and transparency; they want their leaders to be someone they want to be themselves.
People always want to work to be their best selves. But, when that is not happening, often, it’s because of how their leader is behaving.
When you choose to lead, you must inspire those who follow you. It’s a choice that team members make. You can’t force anyone to follow you. People will be more inclined to follow your lead if you create an enabling environment for your team.
Empowered execution is a transformational shift that creates a transformational impact. The idea of empowered execution in leadership is figuring out who you are as a leader—and leading with your authentic self, embodying your values and beliefs.
In this article, we reviewed some of the critical factors around good leadership. Good leadership enables leaders and teams to:
Feel more empowered
Understand intentions
Know what your expectations are
When a leader embodies their values and beliefs, they foster transparency and trust and empower people to carry out their vision.
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