From the course: Management: Top Tips

Determining freedom

From the course: Management: Top Tips

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Determining freedom

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- Part of your leadership style is how much freedom you give to people. And as I just mentioned, it's partly to do with how competent they are and how motivated they are but there is a scale of increasing freedom and at the lower end you've got things like don't do anything 'til I tell you or check with me before you do anything. By all means, suggest ideas but check with me. You can then move them up to the next level of freedom which is to do it but to report afterwards, so either tell me immediately after you do things. If you phone a customer, just do it but let me know, keep me informed of what you've done or you can then go to a bit more freedom and you can say once a week we'll have a meeting, you can just tell me what you've done or even do a monthly report perhaps of what's happened so far in this month, so you could do that, weekly or monthly reporting but you can even go to a higher level of freedom which is where you say to them just do it, you're free to act. I might check occasionally or I might not even check at all, so true empowerment is where people are free to act and you don't check and you trust them to come to you if they've got a problem but if they don't have a problem they can just carry on. So, the important part of leadership style is to decide how much freedom am I going to give this person? And to try to gradually move them up this scale of freedom as you start to trust them more and more, you move them up the scale to the point where they're free to act on their own.

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