How Empowering Leaders Lead: 10 Traits to Build Trust & Teams

Great leaders lift their teams by shaping an environment where collaboration, trust, and good work can take root. When people feel set up to contribute, ask questions, and make decisions, work moves faster and quality rises.

Our own 2025 Employee Sentiment Report points to a few simple truths: only 35% of workers say they feel engaged, and the same share say they feel essential. Better onboarding and stronger culture move those numbers in the right direction—four in five workers say they’d stay longer with better onboarding, and people are eight times more likely to feel engaged in a strong culture. Psychological safety—the sense that it’s okay to speak up and take smart risks—also shows up again and again in high‑performing teams. Google’s Project Aristotle identified it as a top driver of team effectiveness. So, let’s dive into the 10 key empowering leadership traits you can implement to create a more effective team this year.

What is an Empowering Leader?

An empowering leader shares context, invites other voices to the conversation, and sets clear guardrails so people can act. But empowering your people isn’t about being hands off. Instead, it’s more about guardrails: here’s our goal, here’s why it matters, here’s what good looks like—now let’s do it together. Research links empowerment and employee voice with better performance across large samples.

Empowering leadership is a set of repeatable behaviors. The traits below reflect how leadership is taught and practiced across Insight Global’s leaders—anchored in clarity, candor, curiosity, action, and humility—while staying aligned with well‑established team research and what workers say they need to do their best work. Let’s take a look.

10 traits of empowering leaders

1) Share the Vision and the Why

Empowering leaders help teams understand where they’re going and why the work matters. They connect day‑to‑day tasks with long‑term goals and share core messages until they are fully integrated into how you drive together toward a goal. Clarity and purpose meaningfully influence engagement, as reflected in our 2025 Employee Sentiment Report. It shows that workers respond strongly to purpose‑driven communication and a strong culture.

2) Create Clarity, Not Noise

Instead of overwhelming teams with competing priorities, empowering leaders define what matters most and communicate it in simple, actionable terms. Clear guardrails help people make strong, confident decisions and reduce the confusion that often contributes to disengagement or slow ramp‑up during onboarding.

3) Build Togetherness and Trust

High‑performing teams rely on strong relationships, shared effort, and inclusive collaboration. Leaders who empower their teams foster belonging by lifting up others and their work, ensuring people feel included, and supporting open dialogue. Psychological safety—feeling safe enough to contribute ideas and take smart risks—is a well‑documented driver of team effectiveness.

4) Stay Curious and Invite Curiosity in Others

Curiosity fuels better thinking and better solutions. Leaders model curiosity by asking thoughtful questions, exploring new approaches, and encouraging teams to challenge assumptions. This creates an environment where innovation is normal and continuous improvement becomes part of daily work.

5) Act With Courage and Speed

Empowering leaders balance thoughtful risk‑taking with timely decisions. They weigh options, move forward decisively, and help teams adapt quickly to changing demands. This approach supports resilience and prevents teams from getting stuck in hesitation during fast‑moving or high‑pressure periods.

6) Model Candor and Healthy Conversation

Transparency builds trust. Leaders who say what they mean with respect, invite constructive challenge, and share the reasoning behind decisions create clarity and strengthen team alignment. Candor also reinforces psychological safety, a factor Google identified as central to team performance.

7) Remove Roadblocks Instead of Admiring Problems

Empowering leaders turn obstacles into action items. They surface where work gets stuck—unclear processes, ineffective tools, missing access, slow approvals—and then clear the path so people can execute at full strength. The focus is on practical fixes, faster flow, and restoring momentum—not lengthy diagnosis where fixes can be quickly made.

8) Champion Change and Improvement

Progress requires experimentation. Empowering leaders encourage teams to pilot new ideas, refine processes, and iterate without fear. Large‑sample research on empowerment and employee voice shows strong links between these behaviors and job performance, reinforcing the value of creating space for contribution.

9) Choose Optimism, Even Under Pressure

Optimism sets the emotional tone during challenging moments. Leaders who maintain steady, forward‑looking energy help teams stay focused on possibilities rather than obstacles. This mindset supports adaptability and resilience—qualities essential in environments with shifting priorities or rapid change.

10) Stay Humble as You Rise

Confidence and humility can—and should—coexist. Leaders who share credit, own mistakes, and keep listening earn deeper trust and broader followership. Humility keeps learning alive, tempers ego in high‑stakes moments, and sets the tone for a culture where everyone can grow.

How can you become a more empowering leader?

Becoming an empowering leader starts with small, consistent behaviors practiced over time. Begin by reflecting on how you currently show up for your team: where do you create clarity, where you invite ideas, and where you might unintentionally create barriers. Ask for feedback from people who work closest to you. Often, the best and most direct insights come from day‑to‑day interactions.

From there, choose one or two traits from this list to focus on each month over the next year. That might mean clarifying your team’s priorities, asking more questions instead of simply giving a solution, or sharing your decision‑making process openly. Empowering leadership is built through repetition—every interaction or moment of uncertainty can become a chance to model the culture you want your team to experience.

Leaders also strengthen empowering behaviors by investing in their own growth. Stay curious about your craft, seek out new ideas, and remain open to being challenged. Over time, the accumulation of these behaviors builds trust, momentum, and a culture where people feel confident contributing their best work.

Where Insight Global can help

Through building custom teams and our culture consulting services, Insight Global helps teams bring these behaviors to life. Whether through onboarding design, manager coaching, or building teamwork rhythms that elevate voice, clarity, and accountability, our work is customized to your needs. We’re here to help leaders at every level create environments where people feel connected to the work, engaged, productive, supported, effective, and ready to grow. We’d love to help you build a place where great leadership—and great work—can thrive.