Empowerment involves the daily implementation of these four dimensions of
leadership behavior in our concrete behavior. Vision, coupled with a sense of
reality, allows us to define ambitious and achievable goals and to reach them. In
the leadership process, the leader communicates these goals to his or her employees
and then provides them with the necessary resources and the necessary space. Provi-
ding this space takes courage and trust. Finally, the leader has to be able to assist his
or her employees if they have difficulties achieving a goal.
Empowerment is thus a combination of target setting, self-reliance and support.
This is the path that determines the success of a company.
Let me once again define delegating: delegating is the transfer of clearly deline-
ated duties, needs and skills that are necessary to accomplish this task, along with
the related responsibilities. Why should a manager delegate? He or she should do
so in order to distribute tasks so as not to discourage employees and in order to
encourage and challenge them, to train specialists and to take some of the burden
off of himself or herself as leader.
Executives should also pay attention to the following points. Otherwise,
delegating can backfire:
Delegating is not about getting rid of unpleasant tasks. That doesn’t mean that you
cannot delegate an unpleasant task to an employee in an emergency. But if you
do, be sure to explain the situation to the employee, and do not always ask the
same employee.
Delegating should go hand in hand with a careful consideration of an employee’s
personal development. That means you should think about where you want to
encourage this employee and with which tasks you can do this best. Of course,
the quality of their work also has also implications for its assessment on your
part.
You cannot delegate leadership and management responsibilities.
Before a manager starts a delegating talk, he or she should also consider the
following questions: What is the underlying objective? How can I describe
the activity in simple words? What information and documents are required for
the employee? What skills do I need to pass on?
When the conversation takes place you should discuss the following issues: What
does the task look like? Why do I want this employee to take over the task? Is the
employee willing to do the job? What is he or she still lacking (practice, training, etc.)?
What is the time required for the task? How quickly do response, control and returns
need to take place? What resources and information are available to the employee?
At the same time, the manager should consider what problems may result from
delegating. On the part of the employee, these can include:
He or she feels overwhelmed, but does not say so.
He or she claims to be overwhelmed (though this is not true).
The employee truly does feel overwhelmed, and yet there is no way to relieve him
or her from other tasks in the short term. The remaining employees are jealous
because they were not asked to do it.
230 4 More Than Just Talking or: The Instruments of Systemic Leadership