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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article | The Role of Trust in Employee Empowerment

The Role of Trust in Employee Empowerment

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article | The Role of Trust in Employee Empowerment

In modern organisations seeking to increase productivity, innovation, and employee job satisfaction, employee empowerment has become an area of interest. What drives empowerment is fundamental trust — the confidence in managers investing responsibility to employees where they can be accountable for their work and make decisions that influence company goals directly.

The moves to better enable employees sometimes suffer; without trust, micromanagement, poor engagement, or even lost staff can occur. Here, we discuss the importance of faith in employee empowerment and how trust within an organisation can lead to employees being engaged and proactive.

How Trust Enables Employees

Mutual respect fuels an atmosphere of trust and breeds confidence to empower employees. Assuming that employees are responsible and trustworthy implies that we believe in their ability to perform, make reasonable decisions and act ethically. Here are some pros to trust in employee empowerment:

Encourages Autonomy and Decision-Making

Trusted employees take more initiative and are guided by the company practices rather than waiting for every action. It gives employees this autonomy where they have to think on a different level rather than just executing what has been done before. Empowered employees begin to feel more capable in their roles because they recognise that the managers believe in their decision-making capacity.

Fosters Innovation

When employees are motivated to experiment, take risks and explore new ideas — drivers of innovation. One of the critical enablers for a culture of innovation is trust, as employees feel that they can confidently suggest new solutions if their manager trusts them to try them out. On the other hand, no trust will encourage employees to remain in their comfort zones for fear of being blamed if they fall.

Builds Accountability

Accountability without trust and empowerment is not possible. Having faith in your team by instilling a sense of ownership to achieve tasks further increases the chances your people will hold themselves more accountable for their work. This feeling of responsibility increases productivity and performance because the higher your employees feel trusted, the more motivated they are to meet targets. Trust also enables a culture where employees are free to own up for their failures and escape the cycle of failure due to fear of punishment.

Improves Workforce Engagement and Job Satisfaction

More autonomy and trust in their judgements generally leads to more engagement from your employees. Trust results in a positive workplace where employees feel appreciated and respected, generating higher job satisfaction. This leads to higher job security and lower turnover rates since motivated employees are unlikely to search for a new career opportunity in the first place.

How to Build Trust at Work

Transparent Communication

The only key to the issue is open, honest communication between the management and employees. Managers should communicate organisational goals, challenges, and changes with employees and make room for feedback and ideas. Talking to developers helps create transparency and lessens ambivalence.

Support and Resources

Employees need to be equipped to succeed. Managers trust employees to expand their abilities and talent by providing continuous training, guidance, and development opportunities.

Trusting Employees to Do the Job

Delegating important work and trusting employees to do the job without micromanagement by managers. Integrating an organisation’s employees into taking ownership of these critical tasks communicates that management believes in their capabilities and integrity to have such responsibilities.

StrategyDriven Talent Management Article

Empower Your Employees: How to Encourage Staff to Take Pride in the Workplace

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Every business owner wants to create a more productive, passionate and focused workplace, but it can seem easier said than done. However, it doesn’t need to be. All you need to do is encourage staff to take pride in the workplace with a few key steps.

Communicate the Company Vision and Values

Provide your members of staff with a sense of purpose and direction to instill more pride in their position. It can be difficult for your employees to feel proud of their role if they do not understand how it affects others. Continually try to communicate the company’s vision and values to your staff, and detail what makes their role so integral to the business.

Encourage Staff to Learn More About Every Department

There will likely be many talented people on your payroll, who each help your business grow every day. Showcase the talent and passion within the company by encouraging staff to learn more about different departments, rather than them remaining inside the comfort of their cubicle and department.

By doing so, they’ll learn more about the company operations, as well as the hard work and dedication different employees’ display to achieve optimum results for the business. Your staff will gain a great understanding of the inner workings of the business, which can make them feel proud to work for the brand.

It will also educate your employees on how the quality of their work can affect other departments across the business, so they will continually strive to support their colleagues with the highest quality projects and pieces.

Ensure Employees Receive Regular Feedback

Don’t allow standards to slip or passion to diminish. Keep morale and productivity high by ensuring your management team provides regular feedback to your staff. It will enable employees to make the necessary improvements in real time. Don’t settle for annual or bi-annual reviews, which will allow poor habits to develop gradually. Encourage managers to perform monthly feedback sessions to review performances, offer advice, and set monthly expectations.

Consider Creative Rewards for Your Company’s Highest Achievers

A paycheck will not be enough to keep your employees happy and motivated in their job. They also need rewards and recognition to remain content and passionate about both the brand and their position. If you don’t look for ways to recognize your top talent, you could risk them leaving the business for your competitors.

You must, therefore, look for creative ways to reward the company’s high achievers. For example, you could send then a positive email or text message for a job well done, or you could even congratulate them for a successful project within the company newsletter.

There is also an option to offer formal rewards, such as a financial bonus or day off work. You could even choose to host a recognition ceremony to show your employees you appreciate their efforts, and you could present them with Custom Challenge Coins to instill a sense of pride in the workplace, and it will also remind them of how much you appreciate their dedication, talent and hard work every day.

Maintain a Clutter-Free Space

Did you know the average office worker spends approximately 1.5 hours a day looking for something at work? That equates to six weeks of the year. Create a clutter-free space to create a more productive environment for everyone, and a clean environment will also encourage employees to take pride in maintaining a hygienic workspace. Encourage your staff to clean their workspaces and common spaces routinely, and request they look for ways to regularly reduce mess to create a cleaner environment for everyone.

Find Out What Inspires Your Team

Many managers and business owners believe they understand what inspires their staff, but the reality might be very different. Rather than guessing what motivates your team and what makes them feel proud of their role, simply ask them the question. You can either ask employees directly or request they submit their answers anonymously, which will allow them to speak openly and honestly. As a result, you can create a workplace that continually motivates and inspires your staff, which can make them feel empowered within their role.

Offer Continuous Education

Education should not be made available for just inexperienced or underperforming members of staff. Continuous education could be the key to increasing your employees’ knowledge, improving their skill set and helping them to learn more about the current trends within the industry. For instance, continuous education allows accountants and bankers to remain up-to-date with the latest regulations.

Allow Staff to Form Friendships

Teamwork makes the dream work, right? That’s why you must proactively encourage staff to form friendships both inside and outside of work. The people they work with will determine their happiness within the business. Create a sense of pride and camaraderie in the workplace by offering team building activities, which will bring your employees together and have a little fun outside of the office. It’s a great way for people to get to know one another while working together to accomplish a goal, which could transfer to the office.

Give Pep Talks to Struggling Employees

Employees struggling with a task or project might suffer from low morale, and they might start doubting their ability. Keep negative thinking at bay by pulling a member of staff aside to give them a much-needed pep talk, which might be all it takes to inspire your staff to tick the task off their list efficiently. For example, highlight the small improvements they have made, and comment on their past accomplishments, which will support positive thinking while proving they work for a caring employer.

Expand Their Roles

Seasoned employees may know their roles like the back of their hand. A lack of challenges could ultimately lead to a lack of engagement and pride in their position. Foster a sense of engagement by providing staff with new responsibilities, which will challenge their mind and expand their skillset, so they’ll feel happier about their role and the company.

Management Would be Easy if You Didn’t Have to Deal with People, part 3 of 3

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Conditions for Empowerment

We realize that so far this empowerment process looks fairly easy. Set the goals for everyone, establish their boundaries, and set ‘em all loose.

As you might guess, it isn’t quite that simple. But it’s not too far off really.

Before a manager can put a team member in an empowered environment, the manager must be satisfied that the team member can meet some very specific conditions. They’re quite straightforward, but they are absolutely critical.

There are three steps that we follow to ensure that our employees are correctly empowered – that they have both the responsibility and authority to conduct their activities effectively. We’ve already talked a bit about the first two: establishing goals and boundaries.

The third step is to ensure that the correct conditions exist between the manager and the employee. This third step is critical, but oftentimes it isn’t even considered. We’ve found that without these conditions, the employee and the manager are doomed to failure. There are three of these conditions, all of which are equally important, and all of which must be demonstrated by the employee to the manager:[wcm_restrict]

  • Shared Principles
  • Reliability
  • Competency

The diagram below illustrates these three conditions. In order for anyone to be empowered effectively, they must share the principles of the manager and the organization, be reliable, and be competent.

Figure 6: Conditions for Empowerment

All three of these conditions are necessary, and this is depicted by the rounded triangular area in the middle of the diagram. Two out of three isn’t enough – the person in the position must exhibit all three conditions in order for a manager to empower her to achieve her goals on time and within bounds.

Principles include those moral, ethical, and other issues that must be shared, and agreed to, between supervisor and employee. These are standard rules of personal conduct that reflect the underlying beliefs of the company. Only when your principles are shared by your employees should you be willing to empower them to conduct activities on your behalf.

Reliability is critical because you need to know that your employees will do what they say. You can’t manage effectively if you are constantly encountering crises at the 11th hour.

Competency is obviously necessary. None of us would purposely put incompetent people in any position, especially positions of high influence. You want your team to have the skills, knowledge, and natural abilities required for them to perform at a high level.

Wide Boulevards, High Curbs

When you have the right people, who you can fully empower, you can give them increasing responsibilities and goals. As a result, they can accomplish great things.

We think of this as ‘wide boulevards, high curbs.’ The team has lots of latitude, but the goals and the boundaries are clear and unambiguous.

The Process as a Diagnostic Tool

Establishing the framework for empowerment is a key step for your organization, and the empowerment process we’ve described here is designed to guide everyone in your organization in achieving their goals. It establishes the goals, sets boundaries, and provides criteria for the conditions that must exist for empowerment to occur.

The empowerment process also is a very effective means for diagnosing why goals are not being met. In this case, you can look at the boundaries, to ensure that they have been properly set and explained, and you also can look at the three-circle diagram to determine if there is some lack of principles, reliability, or competence. Then you’ll know how to take corrective action.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Author

John Cioffi received his first business education in his family’s restaurant and lodging business. He later held executive positions in several companies, ranging from start-ups to a Fortune 100. He has been a business coach for more than 15 years, is a frequent business speaker, and is a partner in GoalMakers Management Consultants. He received a BA from Colby College, a master’s degree from Dartmouth, and an MBA from Wharton.

Management Would be Easy if You Didn’t Have to Deal with People, part 2 of 3

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Goals and Boundaries

We’re going to use some diagrams to show you how this all works. In all of the diagrams, we use a target as a symbol for the goals of the position and an ‘X’ as a symbol for the starting place of the person in that position (they are about to begin to achieve their goals).


Figure 1: Manager’s Route to a Goal

Manager’s route to a goal

The first diagram, labeled Manager’s Route to a Goal, illustrates the path that you would take to achieve the goal. Perhaps you started the business or the department, or perhaps you already held the position responsible for this goal. Nevertheless, you’ve already acquired the skills and experience to achieve this goal, and you know exactly how to do it. To you, it’s a straight line – you do some activities in a certain way, and there you are at the goal. Simple.

[wcm_restrict]Establishing the boundaries

Your knowledge of how to achieve the goal becomes especially important as you move from being hands-on to being a task manager. As you begin to have other people around to help you, you perhaps couldn’t be more certain that you know how to get things done. After all, you invented the method, and all these other folks report to you. So, you’ll likely be inclined to instruct others to do things as you did (‘do it my way’).

But you simply can’t do everyone’s job for them. And you shouldn’t. You should be planning your business, determining what your customers want, and coaching your team to achieve their goals.

So, the next step is to give the employees as much responsibility and authority as they can assume to reach their goals. The less intervention required by you, the more time you have for other things.

But you can’t merely set them loose. That would be chaos. You need to help them understand their boundaries.


Figure 2: Enabling Empowerment – Establishing the Boundaries

In the next diagram, the employee has a goal, but you’re not allowing him to do absolutely anything to reach it. You’re asking him to work within defined boundaries, ground rules, and principles. For example, you won’t allow your folks to do anything illegal or unethical.

So, let’s be clear about what this diagram tells your employees. It says that they can achieve their goals however they see fit, as long as they stay within bounds. You’ll notice also that ‘time’ is one of the boundaries – the goals must be achieved within a certain time period.

These ideas can be challenging to a manager. Some managers want to continue to closely manage the day to day moves of their employees, while others might feel that this is actually too structured – that employees should be left totally to themselves.

This empowerment model, however, has proven itself over time to be an effective means of achieving goals (which virtually all employees want), while avoiding micromanagement. It focuses everyone on goals, rather than on doing things a certain way.

Early steps to goal achievement


Figure 3: Enabling Empowerment – Early Steps to Goal Achievement

In the next diagram, we witness the early progress of the employee in attempting to achieve his goals. Although he’s still in bounds, he’s zig-zagging all over the place. He’s simply not doing things the way the manager would do them. And this is what drives many managers crazy. Why is he doing all that zig-zagging?

Realize, however, that the path to the goal is straight only because you defined it that way. You concluded that your way was the correct way. But is it the only correct way?

You can begin to free yourself of the management-crisis dilemma when you appreciate two basic facts. First, you can become a highly successful manager only when you can empower others to carry out your vision. Second, the means that others use to reach the goals may be different than yours, while still being effective.

Thus, you can enable others to reach the goals by allowing them to choose their own means of getting there. So, do you get what you want? Yes, if what you want is attaining the goals. No, if what you want is strict conformity to your means of getting there.

Out of Bounds


Figure 4: Enabling Empowerment – Corrective Action Needed

Now let’s look at what happens when the employee doesn’t stay within bounds. In this case, the employee has crossed the boundaries. Perhaps he is behind schedule. Or perhaps he has violated the guidelines for dealing with customers. For whatever reason, he’s out of bounds.

So what happens next? This is where the manager gets involved in establishing some corrective action and some coaching. The company simply won’t allow this.

If this employee behavior happens infrequently, as is usually the case, you will expect your coaching to produce improved performance. If it happens more than you expect, you may need to find that employee a new position, and perhaps that position is with another company. But the behavior won’t be allowed to continue.

You’ll notice that the employee came very close to the boundary earlier on in the process. Perhaps it appeared that he would miss a deadline. At this point, or even beforehand, the supervisor may have coached him to get him back on track – or perhaps he figured it out on his own. Since he got back on track, it appears that something worked.

One of the virtues of this system is that the goals and boundaries are clear. Everyone knows when they are on track or not, and they know when corrective action is needed.

Reaching the Goal


Figure 5: Enabling Empowerment – Reaching the Goal

Ok, let’s give this a happy ending. Take a look at the last diagram in this series.

The employee has now reached his goal. He has stayed within bounds, perhaps with a bit of extra coaching when he got very close to the boundary. But he achieved his goal, and he achieved it on time. Don’t forget that achieving the goal within a certain time is one of the boundaries.

Although he didn’t take the ‘straight line’ you might have taken, he accomplished his goal on time. He was, therefore, successful. He didn’t do it your way, but he succeeded.

Continue on to Management Would be Easy if You Didn’t Have to Deal with People, part 3 of 3 coming next week.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Author

John Cioffi received his first business education in his family’s restaurant and lodging business. He later held executive positions in several companies, ranging from start-ups to a Fortune 100. He has been a business coach for more than 15 years, is a frequent business speaker, and is a partner in GoalMakers Management Consultants. He received a BA from Colby College, a master’s degree from Dartmouth, and an MBA from Wharton.

Management Would be Easy if You Didn’t Have to Deal with People, part 1 of 3

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We frequently remind managers, as well as aspiring managers, that management is a new career. As surely as teaching is different from accounting, management is different than the role that a person held as an employee or as a start-up entrepreneur.

Many new managers, however, find themselves overwhelmed. Instead of focusing on the day-to-day job that earned them their promotion, they now must manage a bunch of other folks with a seemingly endless stream of needs and demands.

So oftentimes, a new manager is just flying blind. She’s trying to deal with a whole array of unknowns, and she already had enough of those.

[wcm_restrict]Enabling Real Empowerment

One means of escaping this dilemma is to truly empower your employees to reach their goals, without your constant involvement. The notion is not for you to conceive, plan, and do everything yourself but rather for you to encourage and coach others to achieve as much as they can. This allows you to do other things – such as work on your business rather than in it.

So how can you empower your team so that you can be a highly successful manager? We believe that the answer to this question has at least three parts, all of which are designed to produce a condition of real empowerment.

First, you should create clear and powerful goals for everyone on your team. You also should have a keen interest in the achievement of these goals, and less interest in the precise ways by which those goals are accomplished (with some caveats, which we’ll explain below).

Second, you must provide clear and consistent guidance to everyone on the team regarding the rules by which they must operate. Just as we all must obey the rules of the road when we drive, so too must your team members adhere to your guidelines and principles.

Third, you must be convinced that your team members meet some very specific conditions related to their competency, principles, and reliability. When they do, you can allow them to achieve their goals in their own way, as long as they stay within the boundaries.

Continue on to Management Would be Easy if You Didn’t Have to Deal with People, part 2 of 3 coming next week.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

Hi there! This article is available for free. Login or register as a StrategyDriven Personal Business Advisor Self-Guided Client by:

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About the Author

John Cioffi received his first business education in his family’s restaurant and lodging business. He later held executive positions in several companies, ranging from start-ups to a Fortune 100. He has been a business coach for more than 15 years, is a frequent business speaker, and is a partner in GoalMakers Management Consultants. He received a BA from Colby College, a master’s degree from Dartmouth, and an MBA from Wharton.