One of my major learning’s from the past one year of my MBA life, where I had the privilege to lead a team in the Students’ Council, is undoubtedly the wonders empowering teammates does. During the initial period, we were very skeptical about giving freedom and liberty to do things as per their thoughts and considerations. We used to insist that a particular thing has to be done in a particular way and nothing else will do. We were hardly open to new thoughts and ideas. But slowly when we started realizing their potential, and started empowering them to take decisions on daily activities, it came as a real surprise. All of them indeed exceeded our expectations and conducted events after events in a manner much better than before. And now that we have moved out of those responsibilities, the people who had worked with us and have taken over from us, are doing wonders out there. I am sure they will make us all proud in whatever they do.
This has taught me an important lesson. Trusting your teammates is one of the most important aspects in a team. Trust them on their capabilities, willingness to learn and perform, to do well. As a team leader, you should want your team to succeed and keep encouraging them to do better and better every time. Small milestones have to be appreciated and large victories have to be celebrated. Giving them freedom in what they do, will make them more responsible towards the team and encourage them to give their best. Research also has shown that empowered employees perform much better than normal ones who just do mechanical labor at the instructions of higher ups. I have no reasons to disagree, primarily because, when you empower someone, you are asking him to think, challenge and decide on certain things. When you give that kind of a freedom to someone, he knows that he is accountable to certain things and is being watched, and at the same time, he is also aware that his actions are important to the outcomes of the team.
I also had a contrasting experience to this recently at Hyderabad. We had been to the Go Karting Zone in the Parking Lot of the International Airport, where the parking rates were supposed to be Rs 50 for Go Karting customers (it was the same parking used by airport customers as well). When we were exiting the parking, we were asked to pay on a per hourly basis, as normal airport customers would do. The reason given was that we had come in a Cab and cabs weren’t eligible for the same (because of some prior experiences of Cab drivers misusing the facility). We, being relatively free, were hell bent on getting to the depth of the matter. The person at the gate had to call his superior, who listened to the entire story, but still couldn’t do anything about it. We insisted on going to the higher ups, but he said they are not on duty and we can contact them only next day. We persisted and eventually he made a dozen odd phone calls and let us go. But the point is, if he, or even the person at the gate is empowered to take decisions on knowing that we are genuine customers, and not misusing the facility, we would have drove away happily. In these days of customers being very demanding, it is imperative that executives who are the touch points with customers make decisions at the moment, because in most cases, the customer doesn’t wait. And once lost, the customer is gone forever. Empowering such executives to take some decisions which can help the customer and/or company will go a long way in enhancing customer satisfaction.
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