Empowerment Means Leadership: Conditions for Empowerment, Part III
Preserve the ability to work on what matters with clear direction, decision rights, and good questions
"I want to empower my teams, but there are a million things they already need to do. We can’t just let them make all the decisions…"
— A committed but confused product VP
I’ve seen the road to product chaos. It’s paved with good intentions.
On one side are burned-out husks of teams given false freedom to deliver fully predefined priorities. On the other lie the bleached bones of teams granted decision-making power, but no strategic direction, slowly drifting away from anything that drives value.
These are two ends of the same horseshoe: one on a sliver-thin path with a false perception of freedom, the other lost in an open field. Both have been given empowerment. Neither is empowered. Both fail.
I should caveat that I don’t see this as a flaw of those trying to create autonomy. Empowerment is hard. If I could give one piece of advice to leaders on both sides of the horseshoe, it’d be this:
For the leaders on the left, pick one or two corporate priorities—and help your teams balance their work mix.
For the leaders on the right side, give your teams a through line that threads all the way to a shared goal.
If self-organization is a key principle of empowerment, then so is intentional leadership. Autonomy doesn’t thrive by default - not when we expect teams to know what to do and just “run with it.” Table-stakes to creating autonomous, empowered teams is the condition of committed and involved leadership.
In Part I, we talked about the need for shared practices and enabling constraints.
In Part II, we explored how teams need a balance of work types to not just do the work right, but do the right work.
Now in Part III, we’re diving into the leadership layer:
How do we create structure that supports autonomy?
How do we make sure teams are empowered and accountable?
And how do we know if it’s working?
Autonomy Without Structure Isn’t Empowerment
One of the most common failure modes of empowerment is assuming that once teams are autonomous, the rest will sort itself out. This has never worked before so don’t assume your team is special.
Empowerment is about helping teams anchor their decisions in shared outcomes with clear accountability.
In this, leaders have the most important role: setting shared direction. There are many frameworks that help with this (shout out opportunity solution trees), but conceptually, this is the scaffold underneath them all:
A long term business outcome / vision (why) that your teams are working toward together.
A focused set of strategic levers (what) that are the areas of opportunity believed to be the strongest bets to achieve the above outcomes.
Sometimes - especially in bigger orgs - you might have multiple levels of this tying outcomes to lever more and more grnularly
When you start down the path of empowerment, each of your teams or domains should have a clear strategic lever to connect their work to a measurable outcome. From there, each team should get autonomy to break that lever down into prioritized problems to solve and define leading indicators that track toward their long-term outcome.
By following this in principle, you’ve set up clear expectations and enabling guardrails: teams are free to focus on what they believe is most valuable—as long as they stay aligned to the strategic lever, and report progress based on success metrics and their contribution to the shared outcome.
“The principles of outcomes over output apply to the whole organization, not only the teams. '10 features this quarter?' That’s output. 'Moving the right metrics?' That’s an outcome."
—Aakash Gupta
When teams understand how their work ladders up to a shared outcome and having success metrics tracked in the open, it creates the conditions you need for real ownership. Not only over the work that ships, but over the impact it makes.
Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Is the Wrong Question
Once the structure is in place, the real work begins—because empowerment isn’t just about what’s defined on paper, it’s about how people behave within that system.
A challenge I often is “we can’t just let teams decide whatever they want to prioritize.” They’re right—but also missing the point.
Autonomy has never been about choosing between top-down and bottom-up control. It’s about designing a system where top-down strategy and bottom-up insight are in constant conversation. Where both leaders and teams take on new behaviors to make that system work.
Jochem van der Veer puts it well in his post, Top-down or bottom-up prioritization is not a decision to make:
“Setting goals and KPIs is done top-down, and everyone has a process for it. Bubbling up opportunities from research, data analyses and customer insights is a bottom-up process every company practices. And yet, how many of us have fabricated OKRs because we couldn’t align on which opportunity to pursue?
The real opportunity—and the real discipline—is using bottom-up opportunity discovery to inform the top-down delivery system. That’s the magic. That’s where empowerment becomes real.”
Thinking about you behavior as a part of a holistic system creates a shared mental model across teams. Goals aren’t vague. Opportunities aren’t disconnected. Strategy and delivery become two sides of the same coin.
(And this is where frameworks like OKRs often fall short—they set goals but don’t help teams connect them to meaningful opportunities or decisions.)
A better question is who can make which decisions
So how do you give autonomy without creating bottoms-up vs tops-down tug of war? One concrete way is to clarify decision rights.
Decision rights are a technique to build a shared understanding of who decides what so people can do their best work without ambiguity or delay. It empowers everyone by articulating the specific choices a person or team can make without needing approval from others.
For example, rather than saying a team "owns product delivery," decision rights clarify that they can decide when to release, what sequencing to follow, or when to change timelines—without escalating every time. These boundaries aren't meant to restrict; they're enabling constraints.
To be effective, decision rights should be:
specific, not conceptual
co-created with the people doing the work
live with the roles that are closest to the work
evolve as context changes.
reflect what leaders are actually comfortable giving away. Pretending to empower while holding back authority is worse than being honest about the limits.
Clarifying decision rights is not about dodging accountability or avoiding collaboration. They bring autonomy to life by establishing consent for the guardrails within which a team can truly operate. Done well, they make work faster, more focused, and more strategic.
When we say we want autonomous teams or to follow the Product Operating model, we can’t forget that autonomy only lasts when it’s backed by (1) structures that reduce friction and reinforce purpose, (2) alignment on transparent metrics that matter, and (3) consent on clear decision rights.
Leading empowered teams looks different than leading teams did 30 years ago: it’s evolving as an even more critical and dynamic role that requires different principles:
Asking questions and setting context over setting priorities and roadmaps.
Creating feedback loops over relying on process rigor and status reports.
Communicating constantly over presenting finished plans.
Monitoring measurable progress over tracking output.
Reinforcing accountability to customer and company over reacting to to internal demands.
Self-organization doesn’t mean chaos. It means treating people like adults who are trusted to make good decisions.
These aren’t just modern management techniques—they’re the new fundamentals of leadership in an empowered, outcome-driven organization.
What This Looks Like in the Real World
Take Sarah's team at a mid-sized e-commerce company. Their leadership doesn't hand down a massive to-do list. Instead, they give the team something more powerful: clarity.
The team's north star is simple: Become the most personalized shopping experience for young professionals.
Their concrete goal? Increase repeat customer purchases by 25% in 18 months.
Their biggest strategic lever? Reduce friction for first-time buyers.
That's it. No 50-page strategy deck. No predefined feature list.
Here's the real twist: Sarah's team gets to define their own leading success metrics. Leadership sets the high-level outcome, but the team decides how they'll measure progress. Maybe they create a "customer discovery ease" score. Or track time-to-second-purchase. They're not just executing. They're strategizing.
In their monthly check-ins, the conversation looks totally different. It's not "What features did you ship?" Instead, the first questions are always:
"What's our progress on repeat purchases?"
"What did we learn about customer behavior?"
Sarah's team now has total freedom to experiment. Some weeks they're running customer interviews. Other weeks they're tweaking recommendation algorithms. They might redesign the homepage navigation or create smarter email triggers.
What makes this work? Their leadership team tracks an outcome that’s measurable, not just shipped work. They set the team up for success by providing context about why the work matters and gave full decision-making power within enabling constraints. And finally they talk regularly to discuss learnings, not micromanage.
The magic is in the boundaries. Empowerment implies real accountability to results. If an empowered team isn’t improving the outcomes they own, something’s off. If the team knows exactly what success looks like, knows what good progress looks like, and knows what choices they have full ownership of, they are set up with complete autonomy to get there.
This isn't just empowerment on paper. It's empowerment that actually works.
Wrapping Up: Empowerment Is a System
Empowerment is a privilege, not a default. It does not work through a policy or a principle, it’s a system. One that depends on shared practices, committed leadership, clear outcomes, and explicit decision rights.
It’s not about letting go. It’s about showing up consistently, intentionally, and transparently.
If you want teams to do their best work:
Give them a clear direction.
Make sure they know what decisions they can make.
Care about progress made through real results, not activity.
And stay in the loop. Not to control, but to support.
Because when empowerment works, it doesn’t look like chaos. It looks like clarity, ownership, and results.
Thanks for reading this series on the conditions for empowerment. If you’ve been following along from Part I through Part III, I’d love to hear what resonates or where it breaks down in your context.