Coaching to Empower: How Great Leaders Unlock Organizational Excellence

Coaching has established itself as the cornerstone of exceptional leadership. Central to this role is the leader’s ability to genuinely empower their people, moving beyond simple delegation to instill true ownership and decision-making authority. When team members feel not just responsible but genuinely empowered through skillful coaching conversations, they bring their full creativity, commitment, and capabilities to their work.

Yet leaders often misunderstand the difference between empowerment and delegation. Delegation is about entrusting a task or responsibility to another person, typically one who is less senior than oneself, whereas empowerment is about giving someone authority or power, making them stronger, more confident, and feeling more in control of what they need to deliver. Empowerment ultimately means that people are authorized and enabled to do what the business needs. To unlock your organization’s ability to perform at the highest standard and to energize your people, you need to capture a greater sense of empowerment and ownership.

Below are a few fundamentals to increase your confidence and ability to empower more, empower better, and empower faster.

Empowerment Is Not a One Size Fits All Approach  

You would not give the same level of autonomy or power to a person in their first month on the job, as you would give to someone seasoned who knows the ins and outs of the company.

Good leaders know how to do gradual empowerment, adapting the ask and the task to the person and the context, based on their skill and will. For less experienced team members (low skill), empowerment should begin with clear guidance and structured support. As they gain in competence, you can gradually increase their autonomy by assigning more complex tasks and decision-making responsibilities, always ensuring they have the necessary resources and mentorship to succeed. For those at higher levels of seniority or expertise, empowerment involves providing them with strategic responsibilities and the freedom to lead initiatives, while still offering occasional feedback and opportunities for professional growth.

Structuring an Empowerment Conversation  

Once you have established where your people they are and how you will guide them, it is key to have a consistent approach to what we believe is an underutilized asset: a well-structured empowerment conversation.

Step 1: Define the WHAT; What Does Success Look Like?  

This sets the expectations and standards that you want to establish, to make sure that you and your team have a shared definition of what good looks like. All too often, the leader doesn’t give concrete references of the standard that is expected, and then if delivery falls short, it creates frustrations and speedbumps that could have been prevented by making sure that your vision is calibrated to the same criteria.

In this step, you can prompt with questions such as:

• What does GOOD look like?
• How can I set you up for success?
• What is the kind of progress/impact we want to create: progressive, incremental, transformational?

Step 2: What Do You Need from Me, and What Do I Need from You?

By setting the scene for how you will operate together, you are defining where you are passing on the baton so that the person can run and act autonomously, giving them greater agility and room to maneuver. This helps people gain confidence, broaden their perspectives, and develop a more robust sense of autonomy.

At this stage, you can leverage coaching prompts including:

• What behaviors, capabilities, and mindset do you need to achieve?
• What resources do you need? How can I help you get them?
• What do you need from me?
• At what points in the process do you need me? How will I know

Step 3: What and Who Do You Need to Know to Be Successful?  

Leaders often forget that a key asset they have is their organizational knowledge of who is who, and how things get done, formally and informally. Opening these doors and unpacking the latent ramifications of an action within the organization will help your team anticipate needs and implications, liaise with the right counterparts, and understand how the dots connect between their actions and the bigger picture.

These are some helpful prompts to coach them to go deeper in this step:

• What is the business context for this?
• On a scale of 1–10, how comfortable are you navigating this context?
• What do you know, and don’t know that I can help with? What is missing?
• What is the impact of these actions/your plan in the broader context of the business?
• Who are your key stakeholders?
• What do you need from them, and what do they need from you?
• What level of trust do you feel you have with them? If not high enough, what can you/we do to increase their trust and set you up for success?

Step 4: What’s In It For You and Us?  

Leaders sometimes need to delegate lower-value tasks, and if people are not motivated or do not feel true ownership, they will often have a half-hearted commitment. You must ensure that they see and understand the value of the work they will do, how it will benefit them professionally and sometimes even personally, but also how it can positively impact the organization at large.

To help make sure that people are on board, motivated, and set up for success, you can align on:

• How does this fit in the big scheme of things: how will it help us achieve our overarching goals?
• How will it help YOU achieve your goals?
• On a scale of 1–10, how motivated are you?
• What is missing?
• What is the impact of not achieving it?
• What will be the consequences?
• What can you do to manage risk? On a scale of 1–10, how comfortable are you navigating this context?

Step 5: How Will We Measure Success?  

This is a crucial landing point to make sure that your expectations are aligned, and that you are creating true accountability and foresight of early yellow flags, so that they raise them when they need you, and before it’s too late. This is not only a key moment of the conversation for empowerment, it also increases everyone’s comfort level with the unexpected things that can go wrong, so that off-track does not become a derail.

To help make sure that people are on board, motivated, and set up for success, you can align on:

• How will we know we are on track?
  • How will we know we are OFF track?
• What will be the early signs?
  • What is your contingency plan?
  • When do you need my involvement?
• How often do we want to check in?

Looking Forward  

Ultimately, empowerment is vital in a leader-coach role, and a good conversation is the cornerstone of this process. By engaging in meaningful dialogues, you can tap into your team members’ aspirations, challenges, and ideas, creating an environment where they feel valued, heard, and trusted. These conversations are opportunities for leaders to delegate authority and power (not only tasks), to set clear expectations, and provide the encouragement needed for team members to take true ownership of the work. Through open and supportive communication, leaders can instill confidence, foster autonomy, and motivate their team to take on greater responsibilities.

Written by Luciana Nuñez.
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