Empowering Team Members: Stories From Leaders

One of the most meaningful leadership moments in my career didn’t start with promoting someone. It started with removing myself.

I was leading a high-performing team where one team member consistently deferred to me in meetings, even though they had strong instincts and credibility with peers. On paper, they were “not ready” for leadership. In reality, they had learned, often unconsciously, that leadership meant having the loudest voice in the room. As someone who had navigated leadership as a queer professional, I recognized this pattern immediately. It wasn’t a capability gap. It was a visibility and a safety gap.

Instead of pushing them into a formal leadership role, I did something unconventional. I named what I was seeing, privately and respectfully, and then redesigned the environment around them. I stopped answering certain questions in meetings and redirected them instead. I asked them to lead decision-making in lower-risk forums where their authority could grow without being challenged publicly. I also made their thinking visible by explicitly crediting their ideas in front of senior stakeholders.

The shift was gradual, but powerful. Within months, the team was naturally turning to them for guidance. When a leadership opportunity formally opened up later, it felt like a non-event. The role simply caught up with the reality.

What I learned is this: leadership development is rarely about teaching confidence. It is about removing the conditions that suppress it. Too often, we try to fix individuals instead of questioning the systems that reward only one leadership style.

In my experience, empowerment is not about giving someone permission. It’s about creating conditions where they no longer need it.

One of my clients was a senior leader with strong technical credibility but low leadership visibility. Their team relied on them heavily, yet they avoided stepping into a more directive, coordinating role across functions. In our work, it became clear that the hesitation wasn’t a lack of ability; it was risk sensitivity and identity friction around being seen as “the one in charge.”

We agreed on a contained leadership stretch: they would lead a cross-team initiative that they would normally support from the background. Instead of giving them a script, I helped them clarify their leadership intent, decision criteria, and communication structure. We rehearsed difficult conversations, stakeholder alignment moves, and how to hold authority without overcorrecting into control.

They stepped into the role with more presence than they expected. The project moved faster because decisions no longer bottlenecked, and peer leaders responded positively to the increased clarity. Most importantly, their self-concept shifted when they stopped seeing leadership as positional and began to see it as behavioral.

What I took from that experience is that empowerment in coaching is less about encouragement and more about structured exposure. Confidence rarely comes first; evidence does. When clients are given a bounded arena, clear feedback loops, and psychological safety, they build leadership identity through action.

When I was 17, my friend Mo and I started a March break camp for kids in our low-income neighbourhood in Ottawa. We had no funding, no experience, and no business running a camp. But Mo, this optimistic, Captain America-type guy, believed we could figure it out together.

Here’s what I learned about empowerment from Mo.

On the first day of camp, we’re running activities when one of the kids pulls out his lunch, a bag of dry, uncooked Kraft Dinner noodles. No water. No cheese sauce. Just crunchy raw pasta. The other kids start laughing. You can see this kid shrinking. He’s about to become the laughingstock of camp for the entire week.

I freeze. I have no idea what to do. But Mo doesn’t hesitate. He walks over, grabs a handful of the dry noodles, pops them in his mouth, and goes: “Oh man, this is so good. Can I have more?”

The other kids stop laughing. They start looking curious. Suddenly, everyone wants to try the dry noodles. By the end of lunch, this kid, whom we started calling “Mac”, was one of the coolest kids at camp.

Later that week, I got an email from Mac’s mother. Subject line: “What have you done with my child?” My stomach dropped. But then I read it. She explained that Mac had severe social anxiety. He’d been to specialists for years. That day, he came home, dropped his bag, and ran to the park to make friends. On his own. For the first time. She wrote: “Whatever you did, thank you.”

Here’s what I learned: I didn’t make that decision. Mo did. In a split second, he saw what needed to happen, and he acted. I had empowered him, not through some formal delegation process, but by creating an environment where he felt ownership over the outcome. He didn’t ask permission. He just led.

That’s the thing about empowerment. It’s not binary. It’s not “you’re empowered” or “you’re not.” It’s a spectrum. And the goal is to push decision-making down to those closest to the information. Mo was standing right there. He saw what I couldn’t see. And because he felt like a leader, not just a helper, he acted like one.

My advice to new leaders: Stop hoarding decisions. Your job isn’t to have all the answers. It’s to build people who can make great decisions without you. Start by giving someone ownership of something that matters, not just tasks, but outcomes. Let them fail small so they can win big. And when they step up? Get out of the way.

The best leaders create other leaders. Mo taught me that when I was 17. I’m still learning it today.

One of the most meaningful leadership moments for me came when I empowered a senior performance analyst at Franchise Fame to step into a leadership role by rethinking how we approached AI adoption across the agency.

This person got it early. They started using generative AI to speed up campaign testing. But here’s the thing, they weren’t just moving faster. They were moving smarter. Instead of manually running A/B tests one at a time, they built systems that could generate and evaluate thousands of campaign variations in a fraction of the time.

What impressed me wasn’t the speed. It was the judgment. They understood something critical: AI should surface insights, not replace thinking. And that’s rare. So I made a call. We shifted the role from running isolated tests to designing the strategic framework behind our campaigns. They moved from executing tasks to defining how campaigns should be structured, how audiences should be segmented, and how performance decisions should be made across platforms. The results? We could reach niche audiences faster and more precisely than any human team could manually manage at scale.

And as their influence grew, the numbers followed. Campaign performance improved. Client acquisition costs dropped. The wider team started adopting this AI-first approach with real confidence, not fear.

So we created a new position: Director of Performance Strategy. They now embed AI-led decision-making across the agency, mentor teams, and set performance standards that balance automation with human judgment.

Here’s what I learned: leadership often emerges when you give high performers real ownership, not just recognition. Empowerment means trusting people with responsibility before they look like traditional leaders. Before the title makes sense on paper. And when you do that well, you don’t just develop one person. You elevate the capability and ambition of the entire organization.

We had a senior developer who was technically excellent but had never led a project. When a midsize fintech client needed a payment system upgrade with tight deadlines, I put him in charge of the technical architecture and client communication instead of assigning one of our usual project leads. I made it clear he owned the decisions, and I was available for consultation but wouldn’t override him unless something was critically wrong.

The first few weeks were uncomfortable for everyone. He second-guessed himself on decisions he was fully capable of making, and the team wasn’t sure how much authority he actually had. But once he realized I wasn’t going to step in and rescue him from every difficult conversation, something shifted. He started making calls, pushing back on scope creep with the client, and reorganizing the team’s workflow in ways that actually worked better than how we’d done it before.

The project delivered on time, the client was happy, and more importantly, we discovered this person could lead complex initiatives. He’s since taken on multiple leadership roles and brought up other developers the same way.

What I learned is that you can’t empower someone halfway. If you give someone authority but keep hovering or overriding their decisions, you’re just creating confusion and undermining their credibility. The other thing I learned is that discomfort is part of the process. Both the person stepping up and the organization around them need time to adjust. If you pull back at the first sign of struggle, you’ve wasted the opportunity. Real growth happens when people have the space to make mistakes, course correct, and succeed on their own terms.

Here’s my story about empowering a team member to take the lead, what happened, and what I wish someone had taught me earlier.

When I was scaling Outreacher.io to $1M+ in revenue, I realized that we weren’t actually limited by the growth we could get from the market, but by me having control of key decisions. Instead of just handing off tasks, I made sure to consciously delegate full decision authority to my outreach manager—not only that, on everything in a major client-acquisition-related process, from what lead sources to utilize to the exact copy to use in outreach campaigns. The only criteria I had in mind were that she had to set KPIs, follow the overall brand guardrails, and report weekly.

The first month was tough – our client onboarding process duration went from 3 days to over 7 as she redesigned the pitch and outreach workflow in ways I wouldn’t have approved of. But by 6 weeks, her sequence optimization already resulted in a 60% increase in average booked calls per outreach campaign. And the clients’ feedback rating on their onboarding experience jumped from 7.5 to 9 out of 10. Most importantly, I stopped receiving Slack pings at midnight asking, “What should I do here?” – she was coming with solutions, not just freaking out about tasks I hadn’t assigned.

The aha! moment wasn’t the improved performance metrics, it was when I saw our bench of problem solvers growing. The key wasn’t just in empowering – the key was in how I chose to empower her. The big shift for me was when I stopped filtering her “hows” and only stepped in when what she was doing could make or break the business or violated company values. It took me some patience and willingness to sit on the sidelines, knowing that I had to allow some “process quality” deterioration for a time. But it paid off by making huge room for exponential learning and solutions that I wouldn’t have created if I hadn’t let go and stamped my style into it.

If I could share something with you, true empowerment means your job is flipped from providing answers to providing outcomes, giving context and guardrails, and taking a step back, even if it means shipping work that is not how you would do it. Managers’ only fear of letting go is losing control. What you actually gain by delegating authority is a multiplier effect – your best people grow much faster, and your company is suddenly 2x deeper. Empowering authority, not just tasks, is how I broke the limits to scale beyond my own.

A few years ago, I noticed a team member who consistently had strong ideas but rarely spoke up in group settings. They were reliable, thoughtful, and clearly understood the work — they just hadn’t been given space to lead yet. When a small but visible project came up, I asked them to take ownership of it and made it clear that I trusted their judgment.

Instead of micromanaging, I set expectations, stayed available for support, and let them run meetings, make decisions, and present updates to stakeholders. At first, they were nervous, but as the project progressed, their confidence grew. They started communicating more clearly, delegating tasks, and proactively solving problems.

The outcome was a successful project that was delivered on time, but more importantly, that team member stepped into a leadership mindset. After that experience, they were more vocal in meetings and eventually took on a formal leadership role.

What I learned is that empowerment isn’t about giving someone a title — it’s about giving them trust, visibility, and room to grow. When people feel supported instead of judged, they often rise higher than you expect.

Years ago, at a national healthcare support services company, I noticed a Director of Operations who was flying under the radar. She was stellar; smart, steady, deeply respected by her team, but had never been viewed as “leadership material” beyond her region. Everyone saw a great executor. I saw a future Regional Director.

Instead of just dropping a new title in her lap, I sat down with her and we co-created a 90-day transition plan. It included coaching, shadowing, and leading a cross-functional initiative to stretch her horizontally across the business. I asked her tough questions, gave her real authority early, and made it clear my job wasn’t to handhold, it was to support her thinking, not replace it.

The outcome? Within six months, her region rose to #1 in performance and engagement. Even better, she built a pipeline of leaders underneath her. Other teams started asking, “What’s she doing differently?” The answer was simple: she’d been empowered and chose to lead the same way.

What I learned:

– People often have untapped leadership capacity, they just need someone to see it and create a path forward.

– Empowerment doesn’t mean sink-or-swim. Structured support is everything.

– And real leadership isn’t proven by how well you perform, it’s how well you lift others up behind you.

That experience shaped how I lead and coach to this day. It’s not about promoting the loudest voice. It’s about nurturing the ones with quiet strength and giving them room to grow.

A clear moment for me was at Create and Grow when I stopped being the bottleneck on link building strategy reviews and asked one of our senior specialists to fully own campaign planning and client communication for a group of SaaS accounts. Up until then, they were executing at a high level but always waiting for final approval. I gave them full decision making authority, including pushing back on clients when something was not strategically sound.

The outcome was immediate. Turnaround times improved, client confidence increased, and the specialist grew into a true lead who started mentoring others. What surprised me most was how much stronger the strategy became once it wasn’t filtered through me. I learned that empowerment only works when it’s real. You cannot delegate responsibility without also delegating trust. Once you do that, people rise faster than you expect and the business becomes far more scalable.

One example that comes to mind is when we created the Director of Compliance position and promoted Hannah Childers into that role in 2025.

Colorado’s landlord-tenant legislation had been changing rapidly, and compliance was becoming increasingly complex. We needed someone whose entire focus was staying ahead of regulatory changes, ensuring our forms and processes were current, and training our team on what was required. That is a leadership role that required expertise, judgment, and the ability to work across the entire company.

Hannah had been with us in customer service and vetting, and she understood both the operational side and how to communicate clearly with people. We gave her the role, supported her in getting the training and resources she needed, and empowered her to make compliance decisions.

The outcome has been excellent. We are more proactive about legislative changes, our team has clearer guidance on complex situations, and our clients are better protected from legal risk. Hannah took ownership of that role completely.

What I learned is that when you give people real responsibility and trust them to handle it, they often exceed what you expected. But you have to actually empower them, not just give them a title and then micromanage everything. That means letting them make decisions, supporting them when they need it, and stepping back when they do not.

It also reinforced that building leadership capacity across the company is essential for sustainable growth. I cannot be the expert in everything or the decision-maker for everything. Creating space for others to lead makes the whole company stronger.

As an endorsement, I appointed a top-performing outreach associate to oversee our link-building strategy for one quarter. Instead of assigning them to simply do tasks I wanted completed, I empowered them by making them responsible for setting their goals, developing the test process for messaging and analyzing and reporting those tests.

By allowing my team to be the owner of the process, they redesigned our methods for determining if a prospect was qualified and therefore improved the overall quality of responses which ultimately led to higher placement percentages and less wasted outreach efforts.

The outcome of this action was more than just improved results; it was a mental transition in the way the associate viewed their role. The associate began to determine which actions would deliver the most impact, rather than waiting for specific instructions. I learned that when you create an environment where individuals are held accountable for their results (not just executing tasks), and have the ability to solve challenges using their approach, this is how you develop real leaders.

The best leadership hire I ever made was someone I didn’t hire for leadership.

I don’t think anyone at Salient thought that Lindsey — who started at Salient as an assistant — had the potential to become an operations manager. When you’re an early-stage agency, every employee has a “whatever needs to get done today” job description. However, as we continued to grow, we began to see the holes in our processes. We had a lack of consistency in client onboarding; our internal workflows were sustained by habit rather than process; and, I was the decision-maker on many issues that should not require my input.

I did not search for or recruit an operations manager. I simply noticed that one existed across from me — Lindsey. She did not have the background to indicate she was an operations manager — i.e., no operations title on her LinkedIn profile, no experience to reference for management. However, what she did possess were an innate desire to repair broken systems (i.e., processes) without needing to be asked and a desire to fail miserably at learning new skills until she could learn them successfully.

I stepped aside from the operational aspects of Salient — not immediately, that is not empowering, that is abandoning. I gradually transferred responsibility for various operational aspects of the business to her and allowed her to make decisions related to the operational aspects of the business. I also avoided the temptation to take control of the operational aspects of the business when she made decisions that were different from how I would have approached those same operational aspects.

From this experience, I have learned that while skills can be taught (e.g., a project management tool can be learned in a week), a person’s disposition is not teachable. A person may be able to be trained in the use of a specific tool or software in a short period of time. A person cannot be trained to care about getting the job done correctly. Prior to this experience, I had been conditioned through the recruiting industry to view the experience and credentials of a candidate as the key predictors of their future performance. However, as I reflect upon my experiences, I am reminded that the two most important factors that predict future success are a person’s attitude and their ability to self-direct (agency). Every time I have hired based on a candidate’s resume over the individual, I have regretted my decision.

I’m a founder in the QSR space. We have 13 Palmetto Superfoods locations. In the restaurant industry, hiring is always the biggest challenge. Finding good people is hard and I always try to promote within when possible.

In one case, one of our store managers had left for another opportunity. I wanted to promote one of our shift leads, but when we spoke about the promotion, she expressed concern regarding her skills as a “bowlrista” — she wasn’t as fast as the other team members. We talked about it and I emphasized the leadership qualities that she had — clear communication, excellent team management, and a real “team player” attitude.

A week later, she accepted the offer and she’s now one of our best store managers. In this case, I learned that some people need just a little encouragement. People don’t always view themselves in the same way as you view them. It’s your job as a leader to make your team members feel empowered and capable.

As COO of OXCCU, a UK company developing new technology to produce sustainable aviation fuel, I have learned that time is the one resource truly limited. In a startup, scaling faster is not about working harder, but about trusting people and giving them real ownership to achieve more together.

When I joined OXCCU many key roles were already in place. That gave me the opportunity to observe how the company worked and how people behaved day to day. One person in particular stood out. She was organised, practical, and consistently drove projects forward. She also had a natural ability to bring people together and keep momentum.

When we had projects to run, I let her lead them. She set up meetings, coordinated internally and externally, and made sure work progressed. She raised concerns when something did not feel right or when decisions needed a different perspective, and she kept me informed without needing to be chased. Along the way, I made sure to give direct feedback and to thank her for how she handled the work, especially under pressure. I never formally gave her a project leader title. I simply stayed out of her way once I saw how capable she was.

The outcome was clear. Projects moved faster and more smoothly, the team trusted her, and she grew in confidence and impact.

What this taught me is that leadership is often about not getting in the way. I believe everyone has a kind of superhero inside them, wanting to do something meaningful. Our role as leaders is to create safe opportunities for that potential to emerge and then have the discipline to step back.

As in all industries, education is a key component to ours. Although I know how essential this is to the success of our team and our business, I was finding managing the scheduling, staying on top of the newest products, techniques, trends and requirements difficult with all of my other responsibilities.

Knowing how much work it can be, I was reluctant to ask someone to take it on. When a team member came to me on her own and asked if she could coordinate and lead an education initiative, I was relieved, and also unsure how to transfer the information I already had, and roll out a new way of working.

The two of us met, surveyed the whole team on wants and needs to make sure we were moving in the right direction. We decided on a test and learn model where the training would be rolled out 1 month at a time, while working on the following month. This gave us room to modify the next month before sharing it with the team. This model worked well for us because it gave us flexibility in the structure.

3 years later, I have very little time dedicated to education for the team so I am able to focus on other areas. Our education lead has gained valuable insight on working toward ideal outcomes while respecting and navigating built-in constraints that a business may have. This not only elevated the expertise and efficiency of how we work, it has strengthened the sense of support felt by the team and the business.

Setting your team up for their personal growth and success is a critical component of leadership. I have worked with numerous team members over the years to empower them in opportune times to upskill, raise their brand, and try new things.

Most recently, I engaged a team member who was interested in raising her profile through an internal presentation on a topic she was passionate about. I absolutely supported her doing so and engaged in some front end conversation around her perceived strengths and weaknesses in this speaking opportunity.

Once we identified those, we blocked dedicated time to review her content and delivery, give it some reps, and built her up through real-time feedback.

When the time came, she crushed it.

Were there things she needed to improve on? Of course, it was her very first public speaking situation, so I was immensely proud of her. No one was prouder and more motivated to improve than she was. Now, 5 presentations later, she’s found her footing in front of a group and has drastically improved her personal brand and is sought out for advice.

I once identified a team member who consistently demonstrated strong judgment but hadn’t yet operated with full authority. Rather than promoting them immediately, I asked them to lead a cross-functional initiative with real delivery risk and executive visibility. They owned decisions, stakeholder alignment, and outcomes, while I deliberately limited my involvement.

The project delivered successfully, but the more important outcome was behavioral: peers began aligning with them without formal direction. What this reinforced for me is that leadership capability is best assessed through decision ownership under uncertainty, not tenure or performance reviews. When people are given real responsibility with clear accountability, leadership becomes observable rather than assumed.

One of the biggest things I’ve learned as a leader of the financial department is that people really take ownership when they feel safe and supported. I usually run and moderate brainstorms in my teams to create the right atmosphere for people. When I notice someone’s ready to step up, I start by making sure they’ve got what they need: a clear understanding of the problem, freedom to explore ideas, enough time and workload to avoid burnout, and the confidence that I value their input—even if their first solution isn’t perfect.

Guiding them when it’s needed, and asking questions more than giving answers, I let them commit to whatever approach makes sense to them. What usually happens blows me away: they get way more invested, their ideas get sharper, and commitment just happens naturally because it’s their solution. Here’s what I have clearly learned from this—leadership is about setting people up to become leaders themselves.

So, my approach is pretty straightforward: make it safe, give them context, hand over the reins, and then get out of the way. 9 out of 10 times, they’ll surprise you with what they can do.