3 principles for empowering your team

Stepping into a management role from a technical role, especially in creative work can be tough. Since September 2020, I have been a senior manager and shareholder in a creative consultancy and I wanted to take some time to reflect upon my journey to management, taking a deep dive into one of the most difficult yet essential aspects of better management and that’s empowering your team.

The micromanager trap

Otherwise coined as the 🚁 helicopter boss, it’s fair to say most new managers (especially those who started out in technical/creative work before) are typically hands-on and controlling. This is largely due to the fact that as new managers, we have a part of us that thinks are colleagues don’t have sufficient skills to make good decisions or are not sufficiently accountable. In other words we are unable to “let go” and provide an environment that is “safe to fail”.

Despite being fortunate to work in a company that was accepted failure as an opportunity to grow, only through regular one on one meetings as a manager did I hear time and time again that my team members welcomed the opportunity to make their own decisions and learn how to “fail” well.

This “learning to fail well” stretches even further than just management. Through product design, entrepreneurship and broader decisions of…