Empowerment provides your team the power to choose how to do their tasks given the boundaries of what to do. This independence allows some creativity to flow and will work positively in all standard operating conditions.
When you are on a turf of unknown-unknown – where, on-the-fly thinking, more of action and continuous experimentation are the key, empowerment is not good enough to produce great results.
Recruit members for attitude, train them for effectiveness, measure output and praise their effort – not brilliance.
Provide your team – the complete autonomy. Let them choose and do what they think is required, the way they feel appropriate, when they think it is ripe and how they feel is effective. Don’t govern their thinking, action and/or results.
This requires a lot of courage on the part of the leader. Absence of fear does not guarantee courage. Presence of mind, ability to keep the leap when you have to take a leap of faith and ability to face failure frequently – ensures courage!
When the journey is defined by a lot of small bets and continuous experiments, autonomy wins by creating memorable and proud outcome(s) – all the way!
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