Welcome to For Leaders, your go-to source for essential leadership insights and perspectives shaping today's world.

In this week’s newsletter:

• Strategic Summaries: Key insights and takeaways on the importance of employee empowerment

• The For Leaders Podcast: Allseated CEO Yaron Lipshitz 

• Words of Wisdom: A powerful leadership quote to inspire

• Leaders’ Library: What we’re reading this week

A curated community of leaders.

Strategic Summaries

A weekly roundup of the most interesting, useful and thought-provoking articles to help you be a better leader. This week we’re focusing on employee empowerment.

Freedom and guardrails. This article introduces the concept of employee empowerment and how it can benefit your organization, while also covering its pitfalls.

Our take: Employee empowerment is a management approach that balances giving your team enough freedom to take ownership of their jobs, while providing them with clear expectations, adequate training, and productive feedback.

For example, it emphasizes a self-employed mentality. When you let your team know that they can affect business outcomes – that their role can influence the bottom line – they’ll be more invested in the business’s success. 

When you ask for input, they’ll be more likely to offer their expertise and best ideas, as they are motivated to contribute and know that their opinions count. 

Key takeaway: The employee empowerment approach can drive team members to do outstanding work, initiate new projects, and be a leader to their teammates, affecting the business’s bottom line in a positive way.

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Does it work? The authors of this article analyzed 105 studies on empowering employees to find out if it is helpful. 

Our take: There are some clear benefits to the employee empowerment approach. It produces creativity in team members and encourages “citizenship behavior” (e.g. voluntarily helping their colleagues, beyond what is expected of them).

It also gives employees trust in their leaders: they’re more willing to put in extra effort without feeling like they’re being exploited. Conversely, if trust hasn’t been built, employees can perceive this approach as just a new way for management to give them extra work.

Interestingly, how long an employee had been with their company affected how successful this approach was. There was a more positive influence on less experienced or newer employees than those who had been with the company for longer.

Key takeaway: Employee empowerment can be beneficial if it's perceived positively by employees. You’re most likely to see results if it’s implemented after building good relationships with your team, based on trust. 

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What it looks like. This article lays out 10 examples of ways to empower your employees. 

Our take: Allowing individuals to have more autonomy in decision making can be highly effective. Although it seems risky, giving employees the authority to make decisions without consulting a manager gives them a valuable role – one they will less likely want to leave.

Sometimes simply recognizing when an employee goes above and beyond can have a huge impact, especially when communicated to the whole team. This builds a culture of appreciation, which often leads to increased productivity.    

In order to ensure employee empowerment is implemented effectively, provide training courses to managers. Teaching them how to empower their team will make any new initiatives better thought out and executed.

Key takeaway: Unsurprisingly, what employee empowerment looks like should be different in each company. Having conversations about your specific workplace needs is essential, whether through formal management training or leadership meetings.  

🎧 For Leaders: Allseated CEO Yaron Lipshitz

Yaron Lipshitz has forged a professional path from military intelligence to investment banking and now as the CEO of SaaS company, Allseated.

He believes in leading by example and having a solid balance between his professional responsibilities and personal interests.    

In this episode, Yaron shares key insights on:

• Why empathy matters in leadership

• The challenges and improvements AI can make

• How a positive and evolving company culture supports its employees

Words of Wisdom

One weekly, impactful quote for leaders.

Leaders' Library

Every week, we share an interesting long-form piece of content to contemplate.

Today, we’re reading The mindsets and practices of excellent CEOs by Carolyn Dewar, Martin Hirt, and Scott Keller.

The authors set out to reveal which mindsets and practices make CEOs the most effective, using data from McKinsey & Company’s extensive database on CEO performance. 

They’ve come up with a model for CEO excellence that is broken into six elements. One of these is called “organizational alignment” – this means realizing early on the full potential of those in key positions, in order to maximize their roles (or let them go).

The best way to enact this is to think systematically about your talent, matching who plays which role, what each individual can achieve, and what the company can do to increase their impact. 

They conclude that “the best CEOs are ordinarily excellent in a few areas, able in all others, and challenged in none.” It’s a robust, thought-provoking model sure to stimulate discussion among leaders.

Thanks for reading! We’ll see you next week with more powerful leadership insights and inspiration.