5 Ways to Build Confidence and Empower Emerging Leaders

As a leader, you’re most likely confident speaking your mind and sharing your vision. You are able to make snap decisions and you feel like your voice is valued and heard. Chances are that many people on your team don’t feel the same way that you do. A part of effective and transformational leadership, I believe, is building up other empowered and confident leaders on your team.

Here are a few ways you can do just that!

1. Have Team Members Lead Meetings

When you create a safe space for team members to take charge and lead a meeting you slowly build their self-confidence muscle. I used to think that as leaders we should set the tone, lead the meeting and wrap up in an efficient way.

During our many Zoom calls during COVID I decided it would be a perfect time to enable each team member to have their turn to lead. We’re a tight knit team and I figured that this was a psychologically safe space for each person to “try it out”. I was astounded by the professionalism and ease at which team members took charge.

Rotating through team members to lead each meeting creates a sense of change and keeps the vibe fresh and the energy renewed. Give it a try. Resist the temptation to have the final word or take over. I’ll be the first to admit that this can be difficult and I’m still a work in progress, however, the benefits besides less prep time on your side is empowered employees which is a win-win!

2. Stop Making Their Decisions

If you’ve ever heard a manager or leader complain that “everything has to come through me and I barely get my work done,” its self-inflicted! You heard that right. I used to be the same way! By mid-afternoon I’d be ready for a nervous breakdown because I had been so busy putting out everyone’s fires and challenges that I hadn’t even started my own work. And guess what? It was my own fault! I wasn’t enabling my team to make decisions, so everything came through me and I was a completely unnecessary bottleneck.

Start small if you can relate to this aggravation. For example, your assistant asks you which courier company to go with and shares two comparable costs. Resist ALL temptation to answer with your preference and simply write back “I trust you to make the right judgement call”. You’ll get to a point where you can simply email back “Thanks for handling” when bigger issues come up.

When you first start doing this, you’re going to feel like a big fat jerk, but guess what? If you keep solving issues for everyone, it’s actually worse because you hold people back from developing problem-solving skills. Will they choose something that you wouldn’t? Probably! Get used to it! Unless you want to be involved in the minutia and day-to-day, you HAVE to release some of these small tasks and empower your team to take over. Start small and eventually as they build their courage muscles they will take on huge headaches that will make you extremely proud and more productive!

3. Encourage Courageous Conversations and Transparency

One of the best skills you can learn as a leader is the ability to tackle issues head on and effectively. I used to avoid confrontation of any kind and it wasn’t until I developed this skill that I realized how empowering and important giving feedback and having difficult conversations was. 

This is equally true for your team! We recently did a workshop for our own team on how to have difficult conversations, give feedback and prepare their thoughts to show up authentically in potentially raw conversations. Since we eliminated anonymous feedback from our 360-review process, we wanted team members to get more comfortable being uncomfortable.

This is an incredibly important life skill that isn’t taught in schools and certainly not in the home I grew up in, so chances are your employees will need some guidance here. Encourage team members to take their grievances directly to other team members. I promise you that you will eliminate a ton of unnecessary drama when a team member quickly realizes that each time they complain about another team member, you will physically bring that person into the discussion. It promotes openness, transparency and trust because they will soon realize that if the tables were turned, the same opportunity to be a part of the conversation would be afforded to them. I didn’t always promote transparency this way; it’s been a work in progress and well worth the investment in time and energy!

4. Leader feedback

Most leaders never ask for feedback. Old-school thinking says “my way or the highway” and as we look at effective and relevant leadership, we realize that getting feedback on our performance as leaders is critically important. We often don’t recognize that a behaviour we’re displaying is negatively impacting the team. So it’s imperative to create a level of trust and safety to ensure team members can call you out on a culture breech or share feedback that’s necessary to set others up for success.

For example, I’m very quick in my communication and my emails tend to be short and to the point. At times, I can miss information that is important for a quote or purchase order. Unless I had feedback from a team member who felt safe enough to share her frustration about it, I would have continued to make her life more challenging while paying for it quite literally as she would have to dig for missing information.

If you’ve never asked your team for feedback, start with a simple question during your next coaching one-on-one:  “As a leader, what should I start, stop and continue?” Be open, be curious and be kind. Write all thoughts down so your team member feels valued, heard and, most importantly, empowered and confident that their voice counts!

5. Take on special projects

A great way to increase engagement, stretch people outside of their comfort zones and evoke a renewed sense of energy towards a goal is to have team members take on special projects. Special projects or tasks shouldn’t be so outside of their comfort zone that it’s disempowering or demotivating. The sweet spot is a project that is outside of their current role, requires some learning and you have provided the necessary resources where they can research or get help as they learn the new task.

This summer we had a team member express an interest in design. She is currently in accounting and it turns out she’s a terrific designer and has an exceptional creative mind. We tasked her with creating playbooks for our operating system manuals and placed her under the wing of our brilliant senior designer. She was given the program and mentorship to succeed and also took it upon herself to learn new techniques on YouTube. We have an energized and enthusiastic team member and discovered a hidden gem of a creative mind in another department. So special projects can be a great way for people to build their confidence trying something they never knew they were capable of!

Each time you provide your team members with a new way to stretch their courage muscles, learn something new, speak their minds and offer their opinions, you communicate their value to them. I believe that this is one of the greatest gifts a leader can give besides time. Make your team feel Engaged. Valued. And Appreciate (The EVA Principle) and use these five ways to boost confidence today as you lead your team.

As always, please share below any thoughts or additional ideas you use to encourage confidence and empowerment on your team!