Leadership is Empowering Others

Empower others with your thoughts and actions. Regardless of your economic status, educational status or career, everyone responds favorably to kind words. Empowering others benefits both the giver and the receiver.

Toastmasters is a speaker’s organization. Picture a new speaker hesitantly rising and making the eternally long walk from their chair to the podium for their ice breaker speech. Walking those eight to ten feet feels like a marathon distance. Facing the group for the first time as the spotlight centers on them causes every internal butterfly to fly in a different direction. Butterflies rarely settle into formation for the ice breaker speech. Gripping the podium with a death grip and hiding behind it with notes shaking has been known to happen to more than one newbie. Four to six minutes may feel like a lifetime. The custom is to give a standing ovation after an ice breaker.

Watching this new speaker emerge and stand confidently and relaxed in front of the group during future speeches thrills both the speaker and the audience. Empowering someone to learn a new skill and progress rewards the entire membership. Feedback after each speech, evaluation, emphasizes all of the strong points and encourages slight areas on improvement. Empowering someone to build on their strengths and develop new skills rewards the evaluator as well as the speaker.

Butterflies gradually learn to fly in formation. Leadership is empowering others. As a leader you have the opportunity to guide and empower others to develop current talents to new heights. The greatest joy for a leader is seeing others grow and blossom.

True leadership can be related to the size of the empowerment desired. A brief word feels like a helicopter, just a touch and go. It comes and goes in a flash. Investing a little more time and effort feel like a STOL port, a short take off and landing runway. Major ventures require a runway similar to the size required for a 747. Mentoring and empowering someone from infancy to maturity in a sport or career requires a 747 runway.

Empowerment can be a 20 yard sprint, a 5K run or a marathon. Whether you choose to invest your time and effort for a brief start and stop, 3.1 miles or 26 miles all depends upon the impact you desire to provide.

Empowerment, like inspiration, motivation or education, must find a willing receiver. Our job as leaders is to provide the empowerment. The employee’s role is to be open minded enough to receive the encouragement and take action.

A college professor one told a young student, “You can have ten years experience or one year’s experience ten times.” The professor, like the mentor or evaluators in a Toastmasters club, provides the encouragement and empowerment along with suggestions for growth and improvement. The student must also be willing to receive and take action. Without receiving and taking action, the words are leaves blowing in the wind.

Effective leadership is empowerment. Few things warm the heart of a leader more than seeing someone respond in a positive way to growth potential.

Examine your leadership skills and practices. Are you a helicopter, a small private plane or a 747? What is the scope of your mentorship? How long a runway do you require to launch your program? Leadership is empowering.

Select your candidates carefully. Select those who will be receptive to growing to their potential. Empower those who are ready, willing and eager to accept the challenge.

Leadership is empowerment; join me at www.Elaine4Success.com and allow me to assist you in reaching your potential.

Leadership Is Empowering Others

Leadership is empowering others to reach for their full potential. In Brian Tracy’s “The Treasury of Quotes,” he describes leadership as “… the ability to get extraordinary achievement from ordinary people.”

No one ever gets to the top alone. It takes the combined efforts of several for anyone to reach the top. In order to be a leader, you naturally must have followers. We do not succeed without sacrifice; it is either our own sacrifice or the sacrifice of others which brings a leader to the top. Leadership implies that the leader has not only personally achieved goals but also knows how to guide others to achieve their goals.

As a leader, there are a few questions which are always in the forefront of my mind.

What things do you feel that I am doing right?

What could I do to be an even better leader?

What do you believe that I am not doing well?

Feedback is the food of champions. There are usually three different realities for a leader. There is the leader’s view of each situation. There is the follower’s (team member) view of each situation. The truth or actual facts are frequently somewhere in between the two. We each see things through our own lens. Our view is tainted by our own experience and our perception. When we brush away the interpretations and expose the facts, it can be an entirely different reality.

If an employee is not happy with their supervisor, they may tell other employees, their friends, their family and perhaps even the ladies at the nail salon or the boys at the bar. The only one who does not know is the supervisor. Unfortunately, the supervisor is the only one who can make it better.

The leader, supervisor, can ask employees to rate their satisfaction with the company culture and their employee status on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being excellent. If the rating comes back as a 7, all the leader knows is that the employee is not totally happy. If the leader follows up with the next question, “What will it take to make it a 10,” then there is solid information to improve the situation.

Feedback not only helps the leader but it clarifies for the employee as well.

No one gets to the top alone. The wise leader brings others up to the top with them. A true leader never allows ego or insecurity to push others down in order to keep themselves on top. The old expression, “it’s lonely at the top” has no merit when the wise leader brings others up to the top with them. At that point, the top is never lonely.