4 Ways Leaders Can Protect Their Time and Empower Their Teams

 

1. Mentor in hindsight. Mentoring is an important role of leadership and helps to groom employees to advance within the organization. However, they learn much less when advice is given on the front end than they do when they have the opportunity to experience their own successes and failures and discuss them with their boss later.

2. Create boundaries for decision-making. Sometimes, it’s hard for employees to determine what they should handle on their own and what is outside the scope of their responsibilities. This problem is alleviated when all employees know exactly what their ultimate role in the company is and when it’s acceptable for them to make mistakes within that role.

3. Have regular meetings with direct reports and designated times for others. Your team will want time with you, and you should be available to them, for mentoring and other reasons. This is where the philosophy of an “open door policy” originated. The mistake frequently made is that this is often interpreted as “open all the time.” The original intent is to have times when you are accessible to your staff, but not necessarily any time, all the time.

4. Be available less often. Think of those times when you’ve been working but away from your email for extended periods, like while you are attending an off-site meeting or conference. And when you get back to it, you’ve likely had a series of emails from one or more members of your team in a progression similar to this:

• (Oldest message) “Hey boss, I know you’re out of the office today but we’re having this issue we’d like to discuss with you…”
• (Next message) “I guess you’re still tied up but if you can squeeze in a minute to call the office…”
• (Last message) “Never mind, we figured it out…”

SOURCE:hbr.org