Last week, we touched on the need for leaders to share power as a necessary criteria for working in an agile way. Flatter power dynamics have all sorts of benefits. Working in a less hierarchal way reduces the pressure on you as a manager. It uses the wisdom of the whole team, including those closest to the work who are likely to have the greatest understanding of the possible consequences of any decision. It’s great for getting your team to buy into the decisions and understand them on a practical level. And it’s good for your team’s development and critical thinking.

But how do you actually empower your team as a manager in practice?

Leaders go last

Who gets the most speaking time in your team? If power is well balanced, share of voice should be well balanced too.

For this to work you need to account for style differences. Whatever their preferences, level of introversion or neurodiversity, you need to make it easy for everyone in your team to contribute.

This means you need different ways they can give their input. If you always lean on group discussion and find you just hear from the same people, that’s a warning sign. Think about capturing written contributions, or asking people to chat in pairs before asking them to share idea. And don’t knock an icebreaker. Even for well established teams who know each other well, a good icebreaker can make it easier to contribute risky ideas later on in the conversation.

Remember that people tend to listen to you more when you are the manager, even when you’re not the best placed for an informed opinion. That’s why it’s a good idea to go last in a group discussion. Give everyone else a chance to share their views before you air yours. That way, you reduce the chance of influencing the conversation so that everybody agrees with you.

Sharing decision making

Hearing equally from the whole team is a great start. But it’s not enough if you still make all the decisions.

Practically, it’s much easier to make collective decisions than most people think it is. Spend time mapping out your options together, then use something like a dot vote to choose which one you want to go with as a team.

There’s lots more collaborative decision making tools in my guide to making better decisions with agile. But the important thing is to open your decisions up. Yes, there are some HR type decisions that only you as the manager can decide on. But if you start looking, there’s lots of scope to include the whole team in deciding what you’ll work on and how you’ll do it.

Go where your team tells you

If you make decisions as a team, you aren’t going to agree with all of them. And that’s ok. A helpful question to ask yourself is “is this safe to try?”. If trying something is hugely risky, that’s a good reason not to do it. But most things aren’t. And the benefits you get from empowering the team outweigh the downsides, especially if you are reflecting regularly together so can course-correct if something isn’t working out.

So if you hear your team telling you they want to go in a certain direction, listen to them. If someone gives you constructive feedback, visibly demonstrate that you are taking it on board. If someone wants to try something, work out what needs to be in place to make that safe to try.

What practices help you be an empowering manager?