How to Give Employees Independence Without Losing Control

Every business owner knows how wear a lot of hats. When first striking on your own, you have a hand in finances, marketing, product design, and everything in . But as your company grows, you need to empower employees to feel that same of independence.

Autonomy is one of our fundamental human needs--an essential component a healthy workplace. "It fills our need intrinsic motivation," says Ben Dattner, organizational psychologist and founder of Dattner Consulting. By he means our need to be by personal interest and enjoyment.

Employees that feel empowered are happier, motivated, more committed to their jobs, and less stressed. The latter is especially for demanding workplaces since independence workers a sense of control in stressful situations.

The benefits business owners are clear: "[Greater autonomy] can to lower turnover and higher levels of creativity, innovation, and performance," says Dustin Jundt, an organizational psychologist Saint Louis University.

Consider these three tips to give employees independence giving up control:

1. Specify the goal, the means. " you grow, you don't want the organization to be so hierarchical it can't be adaptive," Dattner says. "You want people to experiment and game-time decisions."

To encourage creativity, give clear guidelines a project's quality, deadline, and purpose, but leave the rest to your employees. Your team may not execute the project exactly you would have, but their strategy may be as good or better.

2. Set checks and balances. As a business owner, you need to be passionate your ideas, but that enthusiasm can a liability when there's no room second opinions.

"Every leader is subject biases and errors," Dattner says. "You need to build mechanisms for being wrong and allow the freedom to debate other strategies." To do , avoid surrounding yourself with "yes-men."

"You want confident advisors will push back and help vet your ideas rather validating your own rose-tinted glasses," Dattner adds.

3. Know yourself. As you allow others freedom and responsibility, understanding yourself can help ease transition.

"You have to be pretty secure say, I'm going to hire a finance person has more experience in finance than I and I won't understand everything they're doing," Dattner says. Try a free, online personality test recommended by Dattner assess your strengths and weaknesses. The online test was created the 1990s by a psychology professor Penn State University, DuBois. A free app version, iPsy also available in 2011.

It's important understand your own feelings and have a sense of what others experiencing around you, which is referred to as emotional intelligence. You can then identify what motivates each of your employees and empower in ways they'll find fulfilling.


Adapted and abridged from: entrepreneur.com, July 4, 2012.