Page 72 - Just Promoted A 12 Month Road Map for Success in Your New Leadership Role

Entering the Organization 57

lives. Key to these perceptions are the behaviors and expectancies of our boss.
These messages can be verbal or nonverbal, overt or subtle, strong or weak,
supportive or destructive, but they are powerful. People will begin to sense
how you feel about them in the first minute of your first meeting with them.
Their emotional barometers will be fine-tuned, looking for clues about how
you perceive them. They will be carefully assessing themselves through your
communication with them.

Communication as an Empowering Experience
The process of empowering people to be productive depends on clear commu-
nication. Unclear communication can lead to an employee’s feeling apathetic,
angry, or depressed. But clear communication can result in a subordinate’s feel-
ing motivated to succeed. An empowering interaction between boss and
employee can be potent. You can set up positive self-fulfilling prophecies for
those who work for you that will strongly affect job performance.
In a moment of reflection, a sales representative said, “My sales manager
saw things in me that I didn’t even see in myself. She kept challenging me with
a variety of tasks and projects and truly expected that I would handle them
well. She provided me with support when I needed it, and at other times left
me alone to work. She seemed not at all surprised when I successfully met the
challenges. Funny, it reminded me of when I was a kid and a neighbor asked
if he could pay me to work on his lawn because I was doing such a good job
on mine. I did an even better job on his.”

How an Empowering Leader Views Others
A boss’s style tends to be perceived as either personally empowering or per-
sonally diminishing. The impact that the empowering leader’s behavior has
on employees is great whether it is verbal or nonverbal, intended or not
intended. People need to feel able, valuable, and responsible, and when they
feel that way, it can have dramatic implications in the way they approach and
perform their work. The opposite is also true. The leader may not be aware of
the negative impact of skewed glances or “funny” putdowns, but nonetheless
they have a very real effect. The empowering leader goes out of the way to
challenge, coach, support, and reward.
There are psychological reasons for using empowering approaches and
carefully timing your initial interactions with people. Two basic needs of peo-
ple are to feel worthwhile and to feel respected. People who work for empow-