1. Ensure that your organization has a well-defined, widely understood strategy. Empowerment is much easier if the strategic intent of the organization is clear. If everyone knows what the organization is trying to achieve, teams can pull in the same direction without requiring the leader’s constant supervision. A clearly articulated endpoint and touchpoints along the way provide the guardrails for empowerment, keeping things on track.
2. Clearly define roles and responsibilities. The foundation of all empowerment efforts is for everyone to know exactly who is responsible for making which decisions, who has some other form of input—and, equally important, who doesn’t. When roles and responsibilities are murky, decisions end up back on the senior manager’s desk or are endlessly delayed. Significantly, once decisions are made, teams should adhere to the “disagree and commit” management principle: everyone, regardless of their initial perspective, must back the final decision.
3. Invest in capability building (and coaching) up front. Organizations must deliberately cultivate decision-making skills, such as solving problems, assessing performance, and analyzing risk. Managers need to spend meaningful time coaching and upskilling employees and giving them step-up opportunities. To help managers do so, the organization must also invest in efforts to build their leadership and coaching skills.
4. Build an empowerment-oriented culture. The empowerment mindset needs to be instilled into an organization’s culture. Leaders should role-model mindsets and behavior that promote empowerment; managers should role-model, communicate, and build the coaching skills they want to see. In particular, managers and employees will need significant support to get comfortable with failure. To accommodate and even celebrate it as a necessary step on the way to success, leaders should make significant efforts to rework performance-management, investment, and training processes and structures.
5. Decide when the other managerial archetypes are appropriate. Managers don’t have time to be highly involved in every business decision. We encourage them to spend effort up front to decide what is worth their focused attention. If they can delegate important decisions to a highly capable person, they should play the role of coach. If they can’t, the only option might be to micromanage or even to make the decision themselves. They will need to make the tough decisions, acknowledging that less important ones warrant less involvement.

Back to Jackie. After receiving some training on how to coach, arranging problem-solving workshops for her team, and rethinking the way she delegates decisions, she again tries to delegate them. She encourages team members to resolve problems on their own but makes herself available to guide people—short of stepping in and making decisions for them—when they fear going off track. At each of its meetings, the team identifies which decisions must be made, by whom, and with what input. Team members regularly report back on the decisions they are assigned, specify the action taken, the outcome, and any further actions that are needed. The performance of Jackie’s business unit improves, she gets a promotion, and a member of her team fills her former role.