Powerful Tips Designed to Empower Employees to Make Decisions

If you manage other people, you need to recognize that your success depends on their success. The more you empower your employees, the more they will grow and thrive. Employees require the power and authority to make the crucial decisions required to effectively serve your customers and to deliver quality products and services.

We’ve compiled a few tips to help you empower your employees to grow and thrive to reach their maximum decision-making potential.

Provide Clearly Defined Boundaries for Your Employees

There is a common misconception that boundaries restrict team members. On the contrary, clearly defined boundaries will empower your employees to make better decisions. In order for employees to feel confident in their role as decision makers, managers need to define the boundaries within which employees can make their own decisions. By providing these boundaries, you are granting employees the freedom to respond and act within their parameters.

Believe in Your Employees

For most organizations, a dream team doesn’t just fall into their lap – it’s created with time, effort, and mentorship. If you want to experience enhanced performance, take the time to develop employee skills. Discover what each employee does best. What are their strengths and weaknesses?

Once you’ve identified these characteristics, you’ll discover better ways for your team members to support each other. When employees feel supported by management and their fellow team members they will feel more confident in their ability to make sound decisions.

We All Make Mistakes

Everyone makes mistakes. It’s part of human nature. In fact, one could argue that if your team isn’t making mistakes, then they aren’t reaching high enough. However, if you punish mistakes, you will cultivate an overly-conservative environment where employees may not trust their personal ability to make sound decisions. Your employees need room to breathe. They need to understand that occasionally, failure is to be expected.

Just be sure to establish the differences between acceptable mistakes and mission-critical offenses. For example, while it may be acceptable to test a new advertising method and discover it doesn’t work, it’s never acceptable to create false or deceptive advertising.

Require Accountability

Employees need to understand when they are meeting expectations and when they are not. You cannot hold someone accountable if they do not understand the consequences of failure. Furthermore, if they see other employees not being held accountable, they may inadvertently lose their desire to take the extra effort necessary for success.

Create Paths for Growth and Development

Everything in life changes – even people. All of your employees will grow and evolve over time. If you don’t provide people with the opportunity to grow, they may grow stagnant or seek opportunities for growth outside of your organization. As your employees grow and develop they will gain new skills and characteristics that will aid in their decision-making processes.

Make Information Readily Available

Great decision making comes down to accessibility to critical information. Leaving your employees in the dark is the fastest path to making poor decisions. If you want to empower your employees to make sound decisions, you must establish organizational systems that will grant decision makers direct access to the critical information they need to make sound decisions in a timely manner.

Decisions give life to actions. An organization which conscientiously works on empowering their employees to make better decisions will prosper. Not only will you empower your employees to make the big decisions necessary to set actions in motion, but they will grow and develop along the way. If you manage to adhere to these simple tips, you’ll see a meaningful improvement in your employees’ decision making and in your bottom line.

At MenaITech, we develop smart human resources management solutions designed to empower your employees and streamline your daily operations. If you’d like to learn more about how our solutions can propel your organization into the future, contact a member of our team today.