Empowering Your Team Members is More Than Just Building Them Up, it is a Realization in Themselves

Being in a position to lead a team to a successful completion of a project can be more challenging than the task at hand. How can you get your team to get excited and feel as though his or her contribution to the project is just as important as everyone else’s? The answer is in empowering them.

You, as the leader, need to be able to read your team members quickly to figure out their strengths, weaknesses, and who they work well with. Being informed with that information can be the difference between completing a project on time and going over budget due to competition within the team and losing focus of the real goal. A key characteristic to successful empowerment of others is to understand their personality.

It is important to know how to talk to your team as a whole and be able to have it feel personalized and individualized at the same time. Knowing how to talk to your team members individually can really help to get people motivated to do the work to the best of their ability, or better yet, to work even harder than they were before! Taking the characteristics of each team member and adding those to your talk can help make it feel more individualized.

Empowerment is not just building them up to make them feel good, it is about getting them realize that they are good at what they do, that that is why they are on this team and that their contribution is vital to completing the project. Once they realize this inside themselves, then motivating them becomes an easier task. You will notice that your team members have more confidence in themselves and that when you discuss a part of the project, they are able to talk about it, add in suggestions and create a two-way dialog which makes working with them much more interactive.

Here are 3 easy steps to remember when you are faced with a team that needs empowerment.

-  Learn about each team member individually. Learn their strengths, weaknesses, and how they can be most    effective.

- Do a personality scan to understand how you should talk to each person. People are individuals and take orders and understand things in very different ways. Knowing their personality allows you to adapt to them and work with them on their level. This is crucial.

- Focus on getting them to realize their potential. While pumping up your team to get them excited about the project is good, getting each team member to realize that they are an important part of the team is even better. It is at this realization that they will truly be involved in the project and will put more of themselves into it, which in turn, will produce a better end product.

Remember these steps the next time you are in a leadership role. As a business owner, your employees and staff are your team. Focus on getting each individual team member excited about the company in their own way, excited about the projects, and allow them to come to the realization that they play an important role in the organization as well as the project team.