Team empowerment can help your organization create innovative products and services. Encourage team members to feel a sense of ownership in their contributions. Ultimately supporting creative, self-managing, results-driving teams.
In this article, you’ll know four common ways that leaders empower their teams.
Support your team focus
It’s easy to swoop into meetings and conversations and end up requesting new work or deliverables. Doing so can distract the team’s focus and sprint goal may be at risk if new work is introduced.
If you’d like to empower innovative, effective teams that deliver value frequently, you should have to support your team’s focus. As every context is unique, there are always times when sprint goals may be jeopardized or focus reoriented because of a change or unexpected variable. However, deciding when to shift focus is part of your toolbox of leadership skills.
Encourage your team to solve complex problems
Teams that are empowered to solve complex problems are better equipped to deliver value frequently. Let your team manages their own blockers without extra help, and make decisions quickly to keep work on track.
This approach may feel alien at first if you’re used to making a lot of decisions, delegating, stepping in to put out fires, and generally making sure that your organization is progressing toward its goals. Whether you’re a team lead, executive, department manager, or scrum master, Agile leadership training can provide you with the knowledge to understand how empowered teams can benefit your company while also giving you the tools to navigate this type of team leadership style.
Remember your role as a coach and mentor
No matter your role or title, coaching and mentoring enables you to develop innovative and effective teams.
Coaching and mentoring are different. As a coach, you help team members find their own answers. As a mentor, you use your knowledge and background to share what you know. Work with an employee one-on-one to help grow skills in a specific area.
A simple coaching trick to get started is instead of telling the team an answer. Ask yourself, “What would the team say?” This simple trick lets you stop immediately telling someone what to do, giving you a few seconds to pause and ask the question.
Leverage learning and innovation
We always spend 100 percent of our time executing work and none on learning and innovation. As an agile leader, you should delicate the time and space for learning and innovation to be a regular part of team’s work. Learning and innovation are critical for businesses to stay relevant with competitors and create products and services that meet customer needs.
In your leadership role, you can create space by carving out specific innovation days or by having a particular day or part of your sprint cycle where your teams can dedicate themselves to learning a new skill.
Empower teams to drive success now
The ideas above are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to adopting agile leadership behaviors and capabilities. If you’re ready to learn more, register now for our upcoming course today
Isabel Leung and Howie Sung are the co-founders of The Agile Eagle, the premiere Scrum, and Agile training and coaching organization.
Join Isabel and Howie in a Professional training course: https://theagileeagle.com/category/professional-training.
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