Webinar - Giving Your Team the Confidence to Grow - NEW

This event is exclusive to members of The Henley Partnership.

To book please contact your HR or Learning and Development team at your organisation.

Unsure who to contact? Please do not hesitate to contact us at thp@henley.ac.uk

How do successful leaders empower people? This session will offer practical ideas to help give your team real ownership and accountability.

We will explore what empowerment is and what it isn’t:

Empowerment sits in the middle between micromanaging and laissez-faire leadership, i.e. hoping for the best. It involves leaders setting clear expectations, building trust then creating space for people to think critically, problem solve and create business opportunities. We’ll discuss how you navigate this line, supporting people who are ready for more responsibility and developing others who aren’t there yet, while maintaining a strong performance culture.

We will look at the art of giving feedback:

Feedback fuels empowerment. Feedback conversations don’t have to be awkward. Handled well, they should provide an opportunity for recognition, growth, better relationships and increased psychological safety and performance. Leadership is a spectator sport – are you walking the walk by asking for and receiving feedback yourself?

The importance of delegation will be highlighted:

Effective delegation empowers team members and provides valuable career development opportunities. It will free up your time to focus on strategic priorities. Team members need the confidence to request more detailed information or briefing when necessary, so they are fully empowered to do new tasks.

There will be a focus on building relationships:

Empowerment is much easier when you understand the real colleague behind the work face. Do you know what motivates them, their back story, what’s going on in their lives and why they might respond to stress triggers in surprising ways? It’s harder to build trust and deeper relationships on Teams, so we’ll discuss how to make the most of the time you have with them, including enhancing your listening skills so that people feel heard and validated.

Finally, we will look at your leadership style:

How do you show up as a leader? Does how you lead naturally empower others or does delegation feel too risky? Perhaps you tend towards protecting your team or dislike relinquishing control. Using the Parent-Adult-Child model of Transactional Analysis will shift behaviour across the team and make everyone more accountable. We’ll explore ways to run meetings with your team to make them everyone feel more empowered.

By the end of this session, you will:

• understand the importance of using positive reinforcement as a potent motivator and how models can keep feedback impactful by making it specific and related to long-term consequences
• ‘shift the monkey’ – and be able to identify ways to increase delegation and more balanced workflow distribution across the team, freeing up precious time to spend on strategy and other higher value tasks
• have a deeper awareness of your own behaviour and leadership style and the impact this has on team members

Anyone managing others, from early team leadership right through to highly experienced senior leaders.

Zena is a Finalist in The Speaker Awards 2025. She has a global leadership coaching and speaking practice, with a reputation for evidence-based content and practical takeaways delivered in a very entertaining way. She hit a top score of 98.5% satisfaction rate for a Crazy Busy session with Ireland’s Executive Network and she is a regular speaker for the prestigious London Business Forum. Zena has presented to hundreds of business leaders, from bankers to blind and shutter manufacturers, and management consultants to marquee entrepreneurs.

A recruitment entrepreneur herself and Cranfield Business Growth Programme alumna, Zena sold her business in 2007, then completed an MSc in Organisational Psychology and Career Management, plus other postgraduate qualifications in psychological coaching and leadership (at MIT Sloan School of Management).

She has coached on the Executive MBA Programme at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School and is a member of Henley’s Associate Faculty. Her focus is on replacing bad behaviour and crazy busyness with high-performing team relationships.

Zena is the author of three books: Mind Flip: Take the Fear out of Your Career, the award-winning The Crazy Busy Cure and WHSmith’s Travel Business Book of the Month, Badly Behaved People.

*Up to 50 places per member organisation. 'Up to' indicates the maximum number per member organisation. All places are subject to availability at the time of booking.*