Empowering: How Leaders Create the Conditions
“Too much freedom is horrible. It’s like telling a young child, ‘Do whatever you want to.’ … It’s my guess that for every person who needs more freedom, there are ten people who need more help in finding their way.”
A company geared up for a product transformation. The product team made new hires, reorganized departments, and formed new squads. Since leadership wanted to empower their teams, they had erred on the side of leaving the rest undefined.
The teams were grateful for the freedom — at first. Then they became overwhelmed and totally lost. Progress stalled.
Everyone was excited about the idea of empowerment, but also wanted more support to prepare them for it.
I was brought in to help get this back on track. With some realignment and clearer structure, they found their footing but lost time and momentum. With less executive commitment, the transformation could have been derailed entirely.
The biggest issue they had was how best to gradually dial up empowerment. We needed to define how leadership could partner and support, not just get out of the way
“Empowering means creating an environment where your people can own outcomes and not just tasks. This doesn’t mean less management—it means better management.”
In most organizations, empowerment won’t be successful without clear enablement from leadership. They need to foster more ownership from their teams, and gradually step back from making tactical decisions as the team becomes ready to step forward.
Previously I wrote about how to overcome resistance to empowerment. This post is about what leadership can do to make empowerment work.
Forming
A team needs to form before they can storm, norm and perform. Leadership’s initial role here is to set them up for success.
Start With A Team You Believe In
Increasing empowerment is an act of trust, even when it’s a gradual process. It’s much easier to give this trust to a team with trusted individuals across the product triad. Not only will you have more confidence in them, but they can lean on each other. That drives better performance and accountability.
Start with a team likely to succeed: capable, motivated, adaptable and ideally with some prior experience on an empowered team. Focused support is easier to provide, stumbles are easier to address, and early wins set an example for others. You are trying to stack the deck in your favor, get wins, then expand.
Define Purpose and Helpful Constraints
It’s not enough to bring a group of people together. Teams outperform groups, but they need to know why that team exists.
To start, the team needs goals and rules of the game they are being asked to play. These guardrails help the team focus without veering off course. Defining them is leadership’s job.
At minimum, they should have clarity on their problem space and a key outcome defining how progress will be measured. Once they understand the team’s purpose, they can get to work.
Build their Domain Expertise
A newly empowered team almost certainly starts with less about their domain than their leaders do. That needs to reverse. Share what you know: business context, customer insights, strategic priorities. Netflix calls this “leading with context not control.” Then create space for them to build their own customer empathy through research, shadowing and direct engagement.
This is analogous to onboarding a new employee. If you know more than they do about their work, they remain dependent. Once they form their own informed perspectives, they can start to teach you. You can begin to step back, and trust that they can make informed decisions.
Storming, Norming & Performing
Forming sets the stage. Now teams need to start getting results. The evolution of leadership determines if empowerment will continue or stall.
Match Involvement to Need
Don’t mistake empowerment for distance. As Andy Grove said, “delegation without follow-through is abdication.” Instead, tailor the type and level of support based on Grove’s concept of “task-relevant maturity.”
Your management style can range from task-oriented telling to establishing objectives and monitoring. Ken Blanchard’s Situational Leadership framework maps this out, from directing and coaching to supporting and delegating. The right style depends not just on the team, but on the task at hand.
Typically, a new team starts with both high excitement and high ambiguity. Without guidance and support, this is a recipe for a team veering off course.
Direction is often the means to greater autonomy. While this may seem counterintuitive, this should be temporary and task-specific.
The goal is to give teams work that stretches them without overwhelming them. Too little challenge and they stagnate. Too much and they will fail. The sweet spot is the edge of their current abilities. This mirrors the conditions for getting into a flow state.
Think of your role like a personal trainer: teach good form, give them exercises that push them, but not so much that technique breaks down or injury follows.
Neither managers nor teams should expect high autonomy on day one. This will grow as the team finds their feet. As they build a plan, start to execute, and demonstrate success, adjust your involvement accordingly. Autonomy will flow naturally. And be earned.
Make it Safe to Fail
No manager can afford to let their team make catastrophic mistakes. Small mistakes can lead to learning, if the cost is acceptable to the business and customers. Big mistakes damage credibility. Some things that help with this:
Smaller releases. Encourage the team to break large scopes into smaller incremental releases. When changes are isolated, risk is lower and learning more frequent.
Responsible testing. Rather than launching to all customers simultaneously, look for ways to initially contain the exposure. This enables bold experiments with low risk.
Treat failure as learning. When a release does not meet its goals, treat this as a learning opportunity. Encourage the team to assess and iterate.
These are common agile and innovation practices. Encouraging these within your teams lets you confidently loosen your grip.
If a plan seems too risky, don’t tell the team no. Make the bets smaller to manage the risk.
High Leverage Involvement
Successful empowerment doesn’t mean managers stop being involved. It means they are involved where it’s most impactful. With an empowered team, oversight becomes more targeted and higher leverage.
Goal monitoring. Once the team has established its KPIs and goals, shift to tracking achievement not activity. Focus on changes, risks and exceptions. Get more involved where the team needs help and give them space where they don’t. Andy Grove refers to this as “variable inspection.”
Product reviews. While you can start to step back from day to day execution, recurring check-ins remain important. Identify the highest leverage points to provide feedback when it’s easier to change course. Align on goals, problems, design concepts, support needed, results and learnings.
Give specific and timely feedback. Especially in periods of change, people need input and reassurance. Silence is confusing, and a missed opportunity to accelerate change. Specific feedback raises the team’s level of performance. Celebrate wins. This is James Clear’s Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change: “What gets rewarded, gets repeated. What gets punished, gets avoided.”
John Cutler describes this well: effective leadership requires a balance of exception-based oversight, direct presence, and delegation. Each leg makes the other two possible. The full framework is worth reading. When you have done these things well, your role shifts from directing to enabling.
Leadership creates the conditions for empowerment. The team needs to meet them halfway. Next, I’ll talk about what team members themselves can do to accelerate this, get better results and establish trust to make this stick.
This is the second in a three-part series on building empowered product teams. Follow along on my blog by subscribing below or following me on LinkedIn for the next post.
I work with product leaders in improving how they operate and get better outcomes. If you want help getting more leverage as a leader, let’s set up time to discuss.
