Empower Other People Through Your Leadership

By M. Isi Eromosele

Once you know how to empower people as a true leader, they will want to work with you to help you achieve your business goals.

Your ability to enlist the knowledge, energy and resources of your teams enable you to become a production multiplier, leveraging your teams and yourself to achieve much more.

The first step in empowering people is to resist doing anything that disenfranchises them, reducing their energy and enthusiasm for what they do. With people you work with, there are several actions you can take on a daily basis to empower them and make them feel good about themselves.

The deepest need that every individual has is for self-esteem, a sense of being important, valuable, and appreciated. Everything that a leader does in their interactions with their teams affect their self-esteem in some way.

Perhaps the simplest way to make their staff feel good about themselves is for leaders to consistently give expressions of appreciation for everything that their staff does for the benefit of the team and the company. Say “thank you” on every occasion.

Every time you thank another person, you make that person like themselves more. Their self-esteem rises and their self-image improves. As their leader, you cause them to feel more important. You make them feel that what they did was valuable and worthwhile. You empower them.

The wonderful thing about thanking other people is that, every time you say the words “Thank You,” you like yourself better as well. You feel better inside. You feel happier and more content with yourself and life.

You feel more fully integrated and positive about what you are doing. When you develop an attitude of gratitude, this flows from you, the leader, unto the people you interact with. As a result, your popularity increases and your staff become more eager to work with you.

As a leader, another way to make people feel important, to raise their self-esteem, thereby giving them a sense of power and energy, is by the generous use of praise and approval. When children are praised by the people that they look up to, their energy levels rise, their heart rates and respiratory rates increase and they feel happier about themselves overall.

People will always look for ways to reciprocate your kindnesses toward them. When you look for every opportunity to do and say things that make other people feel good about themselves, you will be surprised at not only how good you feel, but at the wonderful things that begin to happen all around you.

The third way to empower others, to build their self-esteem and make them feel important is simply to listen to them. The most important single activity that takes place over time for a leader is listening intently to other people when they are communicating with him or her.

In summary, the three principles for leaders to empower people around them are appreciation, approval, and attention. As a leader, voice your thanks and gratitude to others on every occasion. Praise them for every accomplishment and pay close attention to them when they talk and want to interact with you. These three behaviors alone will greatly empower the people around you.

The more time a leader spends talking to his/her staff and inviting their feedback and comments on the job, the more empowered they will be to do their work well. The word we are talking about in empowerment at work is “ownership.” Your job as a leader is to transfer the ownership into the hearts and minds of your employees.

When they feel personal ownership of a project and the responsibility for doing it well, they will be completely empowered. This is one of the most important aspects of the art of people management.

Humans are primarily emotional. Everything that people do or refrain from doing is triggered by their deeper emotions. As a leader, your job is to connect with their higher and more positive emotions so they feel so good about you that they want to help you and please you in some way.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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