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Leadership Behavior - Enabling Others to Act

Enabling Others to Act is the behavior of a confident leader. Leaders who understand the strengths of their employees and their potential for more responsibility feel confident in enabling others to take control and initiative.

Enabling is a leadership behavior while controlling and directing is a management behavior. While there are times when leaders control and direct, the best behavior is to shift toward enabling.

Leadership Tips

Hire well, orient well and get of out the way.

Why Enabling works:

Employees' brains consistently show higher stress in the presence of the boss. Employees also rate any interaction with the boss as more stressful than interactions with colleagues. Therefore, employees are more calm and focused when they are in charge of their own work and not under the constantly evaluative eye of a boss.

Enabling Others to Act is a leadership behavior in line with how the human brain works in processing information and relationships. Remember that in the course of human history, assembly line and factory type work is recent. Implementing that style work took persuasion, coersion and a certain amount of force to implement and maintain; it still does.

Enlisting people's brains and commitment to their own work has a higher return.

Limits to enabling:

Enabling only happens well when several conditions are met, as employees must:

Clearly understand expectations
Have the skills, knowledge and ability to meet those expectations
Know when they need to call on the leader to remove roadblocks, provide resources, and serve as liaison to other departments and customers

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