How to empower your employees to become decision makers

By: Omar Abdul-Hafiz

In the business world today, a successful company adopts an agile and dynamic business model. Long gone are the days when business administration depended on a highly bureaucratic and restrictive scheme of work. As the world continues to move at a much faster speed, the need to adapt to changes becomes ever more critical.

And one of the major steps every company should consider taking to establish a dynamic business model is to promote a certain degree of decision-making among its staff members.

But how can you do this successfully? Here are some key aspects to think about.

 

Delegation with mentorship

Make no mistake, delegation is the most critical aspect of involving your employees in the decision-making process. This by itself is a good reason to put it at the top of the list. Sadly, however, it is one aspect that many managers fail to implement correctly, if at all.

The two major mistakes many managers make when it comes to delegation is that they are either too insecure or too confident. Being insecure makes the manager very restrictive as to what tasks they should pass on to their team members, thus ending up with very minimal delegation. However, when they are too confident, this would prevent them from keeping a close eye on how their team members are carrying out their tasks, and that’s where mistakes can also happen.

One more important thing to consider with regards to delegation is to hand over the right tasks and give the proper privileges to the team member who has the required set of skills. For example, if you are a manager of a sales team, and one of your team members has a lot of experience in a specific product, then it makes sense to delegate to them the task of negotiating this product with prospective customers.

In short, the secret to successful delegation can be summed up in three points:

• Let them take the lead
• Stay close to them
• Delegate the right task(s) to the right person

Thus, a healthy amount of delegation, accompanied by a certain degree of mentorship, is essential for helping your staff gradually make successful business decisions and become effective leaders.

 

Trust is the way to go

Now that you have delegated things to them, how do you make delegation sustainable? In short, you need trust and a good deal of it.

Naturally, trust is the basis of delegation, to begin with, so just like you trusted your employees to delegate certain things to them, trust that they can actually do it.

Trust should be at the foundation of all work interactions. For your employees to feel fully in charge of their responsibilities, there needs to be a healthy base for a relationship of mutual trust. From one side, there is the manager’s trust in his team members’ competence and abilities. There’s also the team member's confidence in their manager’s capabilities and plans. And they are both equally important.

Therefore, establishing a solid relationship of mutual trust is very important for successful delegation and promoting decision-making among your staff.

 

Hire the right skills

It goes without saying that hiring people with the right skillsets is the cornerstone of establishing the right team. That is a team whose members are expected to be fully capable of working together toward pushing the company’s potential further toward success.

Thus, when we talk about skills, we do not entirely mean technical experience. Although the technical part is essential, no doubt, social and interpersonal skills are no less significant either. An ideal candidate possesses a considerable level of technical know-how and a good deal of interpersonal and communication skills that enable them to blend healthily with their co-workers and the company culture at large.

To put it simply, we can summarize hiring the right skills in two simple points:

• Look at their potential for future effective contribution to your company’s endeavors/growth.
• Keep in mind that they will grow along with your company as long as you take good care of them.

 

Training and up-skilling

We should mention here that the more knowledge and experience you provide for your employees, the better they will become at making successful business decisions. And how can you achieve that? The short answer is with training and up-skilling.

Naturally, giving your employees the power to make decisions on their own entails placing new responsibilities on their shoulders. Thus, with news responsibilities, new skills will be required. And that is where constant training and up-skilling come in handy. The more your employees are well-trained and taken care of, the more they will be able to make successful business decisions in their respective positions. Consequently, this may also help minimize mistakes and bad decisions, which would certainly contribute to the overall success and prosperity of the company.

With the right formula of all the above-mentioned factors, you will be on your way to the successful delegation and effective team-assisted decision-making depending on your own situation. After all, collaborative contributions and teamwork are what working in teams is all about.