Effective Leadership: Stop Enabling, Start Empowering
If you’re a manager or leader in the workplace, your team probably knows all about your management style, team values, and work preferences. You may even communicate all these things regularly, so team members know exactly when to come to you for help. If so, good job. But remember: it’s also up to you to provide the right kind of help, and sometimes it can be hard to determine if what you’re doing is actually—well, helpful.
Photo by Michal Matlon on Unsplash
Generally, leadership intervention can be characterized as either empowering or enabling. While these terms themselves are pretty self-explanatory, recognizing enabling behavior is tricky—and it gets even harder when it comes to your own behavior. In this article, you’ll learn to identify enabling tendencies and how to correct them. Then, we’ll teach you how to empower your employees in their moments of need instead.
It’s Tricky: Enabling Looks a Lot Like Helping
First, let’s unpack what enabling is and how it hurts your team.
Say you’re picking up a small task for a team member because they lack the training. You know you can get it done quickly, so you offer to take care of it this time. In the moment, this appears to help your team member—they may even thank you for it. However, not only are you picking up the extra work, you’re depriving them of learning a skill integral to their job and ultimately their development.
Over time, you both may become frustrated. When a manager jumps in to take over rather than guide a team member through a task, the team member then depends on you to complete it in the future. They may even forget about the task entirely—then be caught off guard when asked to follow-up on it.
This version of ‘helping’ results in a misrepresentation of roles and responsibilities, dissatisfaction or unhappiness, and diminished team morale.
Enabling Behavior Leads to Lasting Challenges (NOT Changes!)
Whether you’re a team leader, manager, collaborator, or trusted resource for your team, you should learn to identify the tendencies that lead to enabling in the workplace. That way, you can correct them before they cause long-term challenges in your team dynamic.
Enablers tend to:
Allow or ignore problematic behavior
Avoid difficult conversations
Focus on more tactical aspects of the work versus the more strategic
“Cover” for team members by making excuses for recurring behavior
Step in to solve even the smallest of problems
If you find yourself identifying with one or more of these, don’t worry - it can be pretty common among managers and leaders. Especially if it hasn’t been pointed out as a development opportunity throughout your career.
In most cases, you’ll find that these behaviors are temporary fixes that make you feel better (helpful) in the moment, but don’t protect you or your team in the long run. Instead, as we’re constantly learning in life as in work, small problems tend to snowball into big ones.
To check your enabling tendencies, simply ask yourself:
Who am I actually helping?
If you’re feeling enthusiastic about changing your behavior as a leader, you might also go so far as to ask those on your team something like, “Are there areas of your work where you feel I can take a step back and give you more space to learn and grow? If so, where?”
Realizing that you have these tendencies also means realizing you (and only you) have the power to correct them.
Stop Enabling to Start Empowering
Luckily, stopping your own enabling behavior is almost as easy as recognizing it.
While solutions for every employee may not appear out of nowhere, change can start to occur simply by adjusting your expectations and making them known.
How to Do It
First, and most importantly throughout the process, stop avoiding or putting off the tough conversations. Every time you feel the urge to ignore an issue, consider whether it could result in a bigger issue if left unattended.
Ask yourself if you’re the right person to be handling work training, reassignment, or outlining new expectations for employees you’ve previously enabled. Do you need a second opinion? Outside support? Should another colleague or HR be involved? Again, because enabling is a personal tendency, you may have fallen into a responsibility that belongs to someone else.
Clearly define the expectations of team roles moving forward. Have a conversation and get individual expectations in writing, so every team member knows what their role is, how to handle issues they might encounter, and resources to support them in their development and growth as they navigate their role.