Empower Your Teams, Don't Micromanage Them

 

Person At the Summit | Simon Migaj | Pexels

This story is adapted from my book, The Success System | Learn To Manage Like A Boss. If you're interested in picking up a copy, you can find it on Amazon or buy the eBook here.

Empowerment. You hear a lot of companies talk about empowerment. They talk about empowering their teams, giving them leeway and autonomy to complete their work. They use phrases like, business owner. They say these things, but oftentimes their actual policies don't align with what they say. Actions speak louder than words, and many companies say they want to empower their people but actually do the exact opposite.

Empowerment is the act of giving someone the authority or power to do something. It's giving an individual autonomy to make a decision and own their outcomes. When employees are empowered to make decisions they feel more ownership, pride and satisfaction in their work. They gain confidence and they gain competence. When empowered people feel a tremendous amount of ownership in both success and failures. That pressure to perform is intensified when they know that they owned the outcomes to their work, their processes and their decisions. 

When employees are not empowered they often feel disconnected from the business. They know that the company has decided everything for them and their responsibility isn't to make decisions or drive change. Their job is to simply show up and follow the stop by stop process that has been laid out for them. That's fine for someone completing a repetitive task, that can only be completed in a single way. Picture someone working on an assembly line. They simply need to take part A and slot it into part B. They'll do this over and over and over again, all day every day. We need it to be done exactly the same because the next step depends on it. That works fine for repetitive tasks, but it fails completely when an employee needs to make decisions in a complex and unpredictable environment. 

How Do Companies Take Away Empowerment

They Mean Well

In some sales organizations companies feel the need to prescribe a specific process in order to achieve a result. This is born out of good intentions. A leader or analyst in the organization believes that if they study the most successful people in the organization that they can identify a narrow path that will always lead to victory. From this investigation they develop the specific process that their teams will need to follow to be successful and business leadership roll it out. 

Once rolled out, through training, email, observations etc, it will be expected as the standard of operation for every single frontline sales person within every customer interaction. Managers will be tasked with observing their team and ensuring they are adhering to the process. They will pull them aside to coach them if they deviate from the process. If an employee continues to stray from the process they may face more serious consequences.

One Size Doesn't Fit All 

This process might work well for some of the staff, but every person is a unique individual. What might be an effective process for one employee may be ineffective for another. Plus, when you are so prescriptive in the method employees can become overwhelmed. The sales team would be spending more time and energy working to remember and execute the steps of the process that little remains of the individual. The customer will see that the salesperson is inauthentic, may perceive it as dishonesty and factor that into their buying decision. It also makes the sales team feel that they have been reduced to a number and all that matters is that they complete the steps. 

The behaviors have become disconnected from the outcomes. So much time and energy is focused on the behaviors in the belief that these specific behaviors will drive the result that leadership forgets that at the end of the day it only matters if we achieve the results we set out to achieve. If we have a car dealership and 1 salesperson always does a test drive and the other never does a test drive but they both close the same amount of customers, do we really care if they are using our special sales process? I certainly hope not. 

Again, these processes start from good intentions and often start very simply. The initial sales process might look something like this.

1. Great the customer
2. Get to know their needs
3. Present a solution
4. Ask for the sale

That isn't a complicated process. It can still be used in a way that causes disengagement. Imagine a situation where a customer walks in already knowing what they want and asks to buy and go quickly. The manager demands that the associate go through the entire process. During this process the customer gets frustrated and walks out. The manager blames the employee for not executing the process correctly and the employee blames the manager for forcing the process where it doesn't belong.

But that process is simple. In big organizations these kinds of paths have a way of becoming more and more complicated as everyone feels the need to add their own touch to it. What starts as a simple process can turn into something like this. 

1. Get the customer with a greeting
1. Use Greeting A
2. Use Greeting B
2. Perform an in-depth customer needs and wants analysis
1. Understand how the customer will use their product in these situations
1. Situation A
2. Situation B
3. Situation C
2. Ask additional questions to understand how they might use additional products
1. Product A
1. Question 1
2. Question 2
3. Question 3
2. Product B...
3. Find something that will work for them
4. Make a product recommendation that ties the benefits to the customer's needs and wants
1. Tie product benefit 1 to need 1
2. Tie product benefit 2 to need 2
3. Tie product benefit 3 to need 3
5. Close the sale

Imagine yourself in the role of a sales associate in an organization that wanted you to use this sales process with every customer. Do you think you could possibly focus on the customer or would you be distracted by this overcomplicated mess of a process? The company had good intentions in creating a sales process that they thought would be successful, but they accidentally crushed the spirit and enthusiasm of their team. Instead of empowering them to come up with a way to close sales, they became micromanagers that tried to dictate every step of the way. 

Turn Business Managers Into Babysitters

Leaders often find themselves in the same situation as their sales teams. They have a prescribed process that they need to follow to generate success. They have specific processes they must complete at specific times. They must complete exactly X number of observations, they must fill out these reports (That no one looks at), they must do X and Y etc. If they miss any step in the process it invalidates their work and their manager will have a talk with them about their performance. People struggle to manage a team in this kind of bureaucracy and will become disconnected from the core mission of the organization. 

By taking away the ability of the team to make decisions in the moment they've removed the individual and authenticity from their work and interactions. Both the leaders and the employees feel trapped within these systems.

The same way that their teams became disconnected and disconnected, the leader became disconnected. They became disengaged because the company had taken away all of their ability to manage as they saw fit. If they didn't get the results they wanted they believed it was the company's fault not theirs. The company had laid out the steps to success and they had followed them exactly and still failed. It wasn't their fault. They were right.

So what can you do about it?

Set Clear Outcomes

Do not focus on the process. Focus on the outcomes. Define clear targets and empower your teams to go and get those results in whatever way works best for them. Do not come up with complex step by step procedures that your team must follow. If you've hired good people they will come up with their own steps that work for them. Rather than forcing your team to expend mental energy memorizing a process that works for someone else, they can spend that energy truly building relationships and building their own skill set. 

If a sales team member has a customer that knows exactly what they want and is on a time crunch they can go ahead and close the sale on the spot. No need to dig into more needs and wants right now. Just make the customer happy and move on to the next one.  When you subject a customer that knows what they want to this complex process they get frustrated and might walk out. That's how it works at many car dealerships. It's a terrible process.  Let your people define the right path to success. You'll have happier employees, happier customers and more sales. 

Account for What You Said You Would Do

When you set clear expectations and you empower your team to be successful, you will get better results. You get the best results when you combine clear outcomes with accountability. That doesn't mean writing your people up though. Accountability is not about fear and punishment but more about understanding. Sitting down and chatting about results and why they are the way they are. This should occur all the time. 

Accountability conversations can occur at the end of a sales period or the end of an individual sale. You might ask how that customer interaction went or discuss their entire week's or month's performance. The important thing is that you regularly interact with your team and discuss the results. Get them talking too, because that is what really matters. Getting your people to discuss their results drives them to more thoroughly understand their business, their results and why they got the results they got. This will help them to more clearly see success and opportunities and craft the best path forward. 

Have you ever had to work in an environment where everything was decided for you in advance. How did that make you feel? Tell me about it! Post below or contact me!