Empowering Yourself

Empowered leadership starts with the way you think about yourself, as well as yourself in relation to others. The assumptions you make about others will drive your behavior toward them, and often those assumptions are based on how you feel about yourself. Empowered leaders trust themselves, and thus, trust those around them. They feel confident in their own abilities, and thus confident in the abilities of others. They accept the mistakes that they themselves make, and thus accept the mistakes of others.

Empowerment is almost impossible for authoritarian leaders and leaders who do not trust employees or coworkers. Such leaders need to have complete authority and control over decision making. They tend to become micro-managers who insist that only their ideas are valid, and examine too critically the work of others. Authoritarian leaders tend to make their decisions in a vacuum. Without counsel or input from anyone else, the vacuum can lead to poor decisions. These types of leaders can become isolated from their teams, diminishing the long term success of the organization.