Empowerment in Action: Turning Skilled Managers Into “Freedom Coaches”

By Helen Beedham

Genuine empowerment starts with skilled managers who coach for clarity, care and constancy – turning everyday teamwork into high-trust, high-freedom performance.

‘We want to empower people to innovate, take decisions, solve problems and own their careers here’. Many business leaders state this aspiration but struggle to realise it. Frequently overlooked is the critical role of managers and what they need to motivate and manage their team members effectively in a high trust, high freedom environment.

How freedom benefits your business

In a genuinely empowered organisation, everyone can articulate what you are collectively striving to achieve and how you’re going about this. This means knowing, team by team, what freedom they have on a day-to-day basis to formulate plans and make decisions within their control, and what the tramlines are within which they are expected to operate.

The business benefits of empowering employees are huge: it brings competitive advantage, productivity gains, nimbler operations and associated bottom line benefits. The multinational Bayer is one company recognising this with their ‘dynamic shared ownership’ initiative designed to hand more autonomy and budget control to teams, speed up development pipelines and better meet customer needs.

Plus it’s deeply satisfying for people to be trusted to deliver. With average job tenure just 3-4 years in the UK (12 months for millennials), people will swiftly hop to another organisation, to self-employment or to a blend of options to secure the work freedom they crave. When they are encouraged to exercise autonomy, express themselves, grow their skills in an interesting way and do meaningful work, they are far more likely to stay, and your business will retain the talent it needs to succeed.

Empowering people doesn’t mean handing over all authority and hoping for the best. It requires leaders to invest in growing highly skilled managers who can coach their teams to deliver successfully in a high-freedom environment. This will also generate value for the business: a 1 point improvement in manager capability is associated with a 27% increase in productivity, according to the World Management Survey.

The 3 traits of an effective freedom coach

Skilled managers aren’t simply adept at delegating and monitoring work, reporting on progress, using the HR system and sharing organisational updates. They are also able to step back and gauge how the team is operating as whole, and step in to support individuals to perform at their best. They know how to build team effectiveness, facilitate group discussions competently, give honest performance feedback and use coaching techniques to help team members fulfil their roles and potential.

In an empowered organisation, skilled managers do 3 things really well:

1. They create clarity about the work to be done and expectations of each team member. The BART framework is one widely researched and respected model for clarifying the team’s boundaries, authority, roles and tasks.
2. They act with care, using psychological tools to identify individuals’ needs, provide support and create a positive team culture. They observe interpersonal dynamics, surface what may be hidden or causing friction, enquire, listen and facilitate effectively.
3. They demonstrate constancy, through a continuous rhythm of check-ins, follow-up and feedback. They honour their promises, maintain open dialogue, champion people’s growth and agency and don’t shy away from difficult conversations.

But it’s a challenging leap

Vodafone is one organisation that has invested in growing manager coaching skills and measured the outcomes in terms of sales performance, retention and promotions; a leading property consultancy takes 100 diverse, high potential colleagues through an annual programme to grow awareness of what a good manager looks like. But the vast majority of managers today aren’t appropriately prepared to become a ‘freedom coach’, for several reasons.

Firstly, the role of a people or line manager has become significantly more complex than just a decade or two ago when it was a largely supervisory role with team members typically physically co-located. Now, managers are expected to master AI tools, manage hybrid and global teams, implement successive waves of organisational change and be informed and supportive of mental and physical health, inclusion, neurodiversity, psychological safety, home life challenges and career advancement.

Second, investment in development aimed at broadening and strengthening manager capability has consistently been lacking. Research shows that 82% managers are ‘accidental’ and have received no formal training; strong individual contributors often get promoted into manager roles on the basis of their technical expertise not their managerial or people skills; and few job descriptions for manager level roles specify ‘managerial skills’ as a requirement.

Third, whilst managers play a crucial role in motivating and supporting team members – influencing 70% of employee engagement levels – they report more negative experiences of work than non-managers and frequently say they feel overwhelmed by tight deadlines, scant resources and competing priorities. If your managers are burnt out and disenchanted, they won’t be investing time and energy in coaching direct reports and building an empowered, high performing team.

How to grow your own freedom coaches

Equipping your managers to empower and coach their teams isn’t a one-off exercise but requires a sustained focus, robust data and a multi-faceted approach drawing on the following:

• Clearly defining the role and expectations of a manager in terms of skills, experience and attributes, and educating people about this;
• Reviewing and redesigning how manager hiring and promotion decisions are made;
• Assessing your current managers via 180° or 360° feedback and analysing your team-level employee engagement and retention scores;
• Building your manager pipeline similarly to your talent pipeline, by mapping performance and potential and using this to guide development conversations and goals;
• Designing a development programme for new and existing managers with modules covering the 3 areas described above (create clarity, act with care, demonstrate constancy) plus live group coaching clinics;
• Implementing peer support mechanisms such as buddying new managers with experienced ones and manager-led exchanges of experiences and advice;
• Introducing just-in-time AI coaching prompts to provide helpful reminders before critical conversations;
• Providing temporary hands-on support to new/underperforming/overstretched managers and teams; one insurance company ran workshops for their managers and teams to experience live team development and learn from this;
• Making managerial skills desirable by linking these to sought-after advancement opportunities and securing professional accreditation.

Get started today

The above recommendations require long-term intent and investment; in the meantime, here are three actions leaders can take now to get the ball rolling and conversations flowing:

1. Recognise positive examples of freedom coaching in action when you see it by speaking directly with the manager involved or sending them a personal note.
2. Run a few focus groups with managers to find out what they find challenging about their role and what support they’d welcome.
3. Share your own experiences of being managed and the impact these have had on you personally and professionally.

Creating a culture of empowerment doesn’t happen by osmosis and it’s not enough to invest in executive development programmes. We need to change people’s daily experience of work and that means focusing on managers: they hold the key to unlocking people’s potential and discretionary effort.

About the Author

Helen Beedham is the author of People Glue, an organisational expert, speaker, and host of The Business of Being Brilliant podcast. Her first book The Future of Time: How ‘re-working’ time can help you boost productivity, diversity and wellbeing was named People, Culture & Management Book of the Year at the Business Book Awards and she regularly comments on the future of work in national, business and HR press.