Pat Lencioni's Australian live virtual event coming to Growth Faculty in February 2025.

If you could get all the people in the organisation rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time - Patrick Lencioni.

Empowering employees is the secret to any successful business. In fact, a healthy culture of empowerment can increase job satisfaction and reduce employee turnover by as much as 34%.

Thought leader Patrick Lencioni sets out in his books The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and The 6 Types Of Working Genius that a culture of empowerment is built on 4 essential pillars.

These pillars include an understanding of the ideal team player , the 4 disciplines model , the 6 types of working genius and 5 essential behaviours of a high performing team.

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Ahead of Pat Lencioni's Australian live virtual event in February 2025, let's look at 5 leading strategies of empowerment in the workplace and how leaders can use them to empower their teams.

What Is Team Empowerment In The Workplace?

As he says at his Patrick Lencioni live virtual events: If you create the right environment, success is almost impossible to prevent.

Empowerment in the workplace means giving your teams the freedom to take ownership of their work and contribute to decision making. It starts with leaders from the top, and involves embracing transparency, making space for creative work, listening to employees and holding them accountable.

In fact, research frequently shows when you empower employees at work, they'll display stronger job performance and commitment to the organisation.

Empowered employees have greater trust in their leaders, greater job satisfaction and are 43% less likely to experience burnout. Teams experience better problem solving, efficiency and greater accountability.

The bottom line is empowering your employees is a net positive for team members, managers and the organisation.

5 Leading Strategies to Empower Your Teams

According to Lencioni, there are 5 key behaviours that create dysfunction in workplace teams. These include an absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to results.

To counteract these behaviours, Lencioni says leaders need to set in place 5 essential actions. These include:

• Demonstrating responsibility
• Demonstrating restraint
• Pushing the group
• Encouraging a culture of accountability
• Setting the tone for a focus on results

So, how can leaders use these behaviours to empower their teams? Lets take a look.

Provide Support

"The single biggest factor determining whether an organisation is going to get healthier - or not- is the genuine commitment and active involvement of the person in charge." - Patrick Lencioni

Empowerment starts from the top.

So, to create a culture of empowerment, leaders need to push their employees to do their best work and provide them with the tools and support they need to do so.

This can be anything from upgrading a work laptop to covering the cost of a training program - anything your employees need to complete a project or task to their best ability.

Leaders can also support and encourage employees to tap into their areas of working genius and engage less in areas of weakness. This helps us find the things we're naturally good at, and ultimately helps us find joy, energy and empowerment in our work.

Reiterate Goals & Vision

One of the best ways to empower your employees is to ensure everyone understands their individual role in the team, as well as the overall team objectives.

As Patrick Lencioni highlights, leaders need to set the tone for a focus on results. This involves creating clarity, overcommunicating clarity and (you guessed it) reinforcing clarity.

To create clarity, leaders need to clearly define the roles, goals, responsibilities and standards for each project or task and communicate these expectations frequently with the team. This ensures every employee is aware of what they need to achieve and holds them accountable for attaining certain goals.

Team and company-wide visibility across tasks and projects is vital, because everyone knows what you expect from them, and what they can expect from you.

Provide Feedback

"True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes." - Daniel Kahneman

Taking the time to provide genuine, constructive feedback can drastically improve the overall performance of an individual or team. When leaders have high emotional intelligence , they provide clear, constructive feedback that focuses on behaviour, not the person, and their strengths, not their weaknesses.

To encourage a culture of accountability , Lencioni notes that feedback needs to be a two-way street. Leaders need to create a healthy workplace culture where the team is comfortable sharing and receiving feedback on a regular basis. Without it, you're robbing your employees (and yourself) of the opportunity to improve and grow.

A recent PWC survey highlighted that nearly 60% of employees appreciate feedback on a daily or weekly basis.

Feedback fosters a psychologically safe work environment where teams are aware of their strengths and weaknesses and feel more confident tackling obstacles and asking questions.

Leaders can foster a healthy feedback culture by creating an open-door policy and listening attentively and respectfully to employees' thoughts and concerns. When employees feel comfortable asking for and receiving feedback, youll start to see noticeable changes in how your business operates.

Teach Your Teams to Embrace Failure

"There is absolutely no innovation without failure." - Brené Brown

We learn best from our mistakes and figuring out how to correct them. So, to empower your teams, leaders need to reward vulnerability and embrace failure.

When a task or idea doesn't work out, leaders should not react with anger, but instead get employees to analyse the situation and what they will learn from it.

Amy Edmondson from Harvard Business School outlines psychological safety as "A belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes."

Forgiving mistakes enhances an employee's sense of trust in you and gives them to confidence to step out of their comfort zone and try new things.

When your teams feel comfortable making mistakes and asking for help, you'll create a culture of accountability where trust and cohesiveness will follow.

Patrick Lencioni outlines in his book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team , when you establish trust, teams feel comfortable engaging in honest, healthy conflict. When there is mutual trust, you're more likely to create high-performing teams and a psychologically safe workplace.

Reward & Recognise

Acknowledging and celebrating your employees' efforts is the key to empower and engage your teams. This involves recognising employees for the role they play in the team and their individual efforts.

Showing appreciation for a job well done empowers employees to do it again (and probably do it better). It sets the tone for a focus on results and motivates them to be innovative, take action and to solve problems.

Best still, businesses who celebrate and value their employees in this way report 59% less staff turnover.

The practice of recognising employees can be anything from highlighting their individual achievements in front of the team, or investing in workplace coaching. This reinforces a sense of individual and collective empowerment by showing employees you genuinely care about their learning and want to invest in their career development.

It's a must-have for leaders who want to boost their teams and workplace culture.

6 Things You Need To Empower Your Team

Signs of a dysfunctional team include disengaging, missing deadlines, cliques and inevitably, high turnover.

To counteract Patrick Lencioni's 5 behaviours of a dysfunctional team , leaders need to take accountability to create a workplace built on the below characteristics:

1. Trust

Trust in the workplace is the foundation of team empowerment. Without it, employees won't feel safe to speak up if they make a mistake or are struggling.

To create an environment of vulnerability-based trust, the leader must make the first move. You can do this by sharing experiences of failure, demonstrating humility or letting an employee teach you a new skill or approach.

If leaders can't be vulnerable, then team members won't feel like they need to be either.

2. A Psychologically Safe Workplace

"Trust is the confidence among team members that their peers intentions are good and that there is no reason to be protective or careful around the group." - Patrick Lencioni

When you create a psychologically safe workplace, you motivate your team to better push through challenges and roadblocks. Employees are more likely to feel valued and respected and the feeling of empowerment among team members is higher.

On the other hand, when there is a toxic workplace culture , morale is low, there is often absenteeism, high turnover, poor results and wellbeing issues. It erodes trust and you'll stand no chance at empowering your employees.

Ensure you book Pat Lencioni's Australian live virtual event in February 2025 to hear his engaging talk on these empowerment factors.

3. Accountability

In his book Creating a Culture of Accountability , Mark Green highlights that accountability is about making employees answerable for their actions and the results they are paid to deliver.

Accountability focuses on results, rather than tasks , and gives your team greater control over their work and a higher sense of empowerment. In turn, a culture of accountability leads to higher employee engagement and a stronger, higher performing team.

As Patrick Lencioni highlights, if a leader is not willing to hold employees accountable to their actions, it can lead to a dysfunctional team with low motivation.

4. Attention to Results

Lencioni notes that teams begin to derail when members are more concerned with their own individual achievements rather than the overall goals of the team.

This often comes in the form of people striving to achieve individual recognition within the company rather than promoting collective accomplishments.

To overcome this dysfunction, Lencioni asserts that teams have to eliminate ambiguity and interpretation when it comes to results. Teams need a clear way to measure goals in a calculated, observable way to prevent members straying from group achievements.

5. Commitment

"If people have the opportunity to weigh in, they will buy in." - Patrick Lencioni.

According to Lencioni, for team members to commit to the organisation and the task at hand, they need clarity and buy-in. You must be clear and specific about the desired outcome with your employees, what is expected of them and why the task is important.

When team commitment is lacking, there is no clear direction or vision for the team. Members lack confidence, are afraid to fail and will revisit topics over and over again.

6. Access to Patrick Lencioni's Masterclass

Don't miss the world's foremost expert on organisational health and teamwork; Growth Faculty presents a Patrick Lencioni Australian live virtual event in February 2025.

As well as the 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, and The Ideal Team Player he will share his thought-provoking research on the 6 types of working genius, and how leaders can leverage their realm of genius to create a culture of empowerment.

Leaders can expect to gain insight to understand their natural gifts, find fulfilment at work, improve wellbeing and discover how to harness their emotional intelligence.

Growth Faculty members benefit from a world-class immersive live virtual learning program of events - all included in their annual subscription. It’s an engaging and entertaining way to develop leaders.

Growth Faculty recently launched a good value Enterprise plan for larger companies to develop leadership skills across their whole organisation.

New events are being added regularly to this highly curated program. Keep an eye on the website Growthfaculty.com for fresh additions to the line-up.

There are separate multi-week live virtual programs for emerging leaders and for senior leaders offering a condensed leadership course in a time-effective way.

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