Today I received a valuable tip about leadership. I've always known that empowering people to take more responsibility and initiative is important. But what I have experienced giving them permission and encouraging them to do what feels right rarely works.
With such vague promises people are often left confused. They don't know exactly what they are allowed to do despite all my encouragement. It's also hard to give any examples at that situation.
What I instead should be doing is delegating such tasks to them. By giving these concrete examples of "my" tasks that I trust them to do they get used to do those, and similar things on their own without expecting me to assign those to them.
In addition, this approach has the added benefit of freeing up my own time from those tasks.