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Empower People and Maximize Results

Balancing Leadership Intentions: The Path to Employee Empowerment

Gestalt psychotherapist Fritz Perls once asked, “How is it possible to be unattached to the outcome, fully in the moment, and yet have a clear agenda?” Having multiple leadership intentions without feeling scattered is hard. I want to empower my team while, at the same time, optimizing our best results. As a leader, it’s easy to miss the power dynamics with my team if they’re always feeling like I might swoop in, so I came up with four questions that helped me see how I can be better at empowering people and maximizing results.

1. What assumptions am I holding about my role as a leader?

2. How do my assumptions get in the way of empowering others?

3. What if my team knows better than me, and how could I create the conditions for that to happen?

4. How can I give space for small failures that build wisdom and make us stronger in the long run?

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Chip Conley

Founder at Modern Elder Academy & Best-Selling Author
Chip Conley is on a mission. After disrupting the hospitality industry twice, first as the founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, the second-largest operator of boutique hotels in the U.S., and then as Airbnb’s Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy, leading a worldwide revolution in travel, Conley co-founded MEA (Modern Elder Academy) in January 2018. Inspired by his experience of intergenerational mentoring as a ‘modern elder’ at Airbnb, where his guidance was instrumental to the company’s extraordinary transformation from a fast-growing start-up to the world’s most valuable hospitality brand, MEA is the world's first ‘midlife wisdom school.’ Dedicated to reframing the concept of aging, MEA supports students to navigate midlife with a renewed sense of purpose and possibility. A New York Times bestselling author, Conley's 7th book Learning to Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better with Age, is about rebranding midlife to help people understand the upside of this often-misunderstood life stage, and he was asked to give a 2023 TED talk on the "midlife chrysalis."

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