Leadership (Empowerment)

Leadership Characteristic: Empowerment

A leadership characteristic that has become more popular lately is empowerment. Leaders that empower their team give them more decision making power, less supervision and more responsibility thereby giving them a greater sense of achievement, pride and ownership of the project or tasks. Empowering people can be as simple as delegating tasks or asking for input in a decision to being as complex as allowing a group or individual to expand upon an idea then implement the task.

This quality is not seen very often in my workplace however, there is an executive in a vice presidents role within our college who has this characteristic. She is a person who will schedule meetings at irregular intervals, buy us lunch, and discuss issues surrounding the college. As we are in the process of building a new campus, most of the discussion surrounds the building, equipment, layout and needs that we have as a campus. This person has empowered the staff in Cold Lake to make the building ours by asking us what we need and want, then returning later with new plans implementing our ideas. She has therefore created a sense of pride and ownership with relation to the new campus and shown herself to be a true leader in the process.