Empower Your Team: How to Help Without Enabling or Lowering Standards
Does your feedback, input, coaching, and decision-making genuinely make a difference? Have you stopped to challenge yourself on whether your actions are driving meaningful change or unintentionally holding your team back? Leadership is full of fine lines, and one of the most important distinctions is the one between helping and enabling.
As leaders, we make hundreds, if not thousands, of small decisions every day. These decisions shape outcomes for our stores, districts, and teams. How you engage with your team, particularly your direct reports, can make or break short- and long-term results. While these may sound familiar, they can be easily taken for granted. It’s worth taking some time to understand the difference (and your role) between helping and enabling, especially when coaching is involved.
Leaders who differentiate between helping and enabling lay the foundation for accountability and long-term success.
Coaching is an undervalued and often misunderstood leadership skill. Effective coaching is the cornerstone of helping, but it’s also where the risk of enabling can sneak in. The conversations you have and the feedback you provide can either support someone in growing and taking ownership or inadvertently encourage them to remain stuck in old patterns. Leaders who differentiate between helping and enabling lay the foundation for accountability and long-term success.
The Differences Between Helping and Enabling
Helping someone involves providing support that empowers them to manage their responsibilities and make positive changes. Enabling, on the other hand, provides support that shields someone from the consequences of their actions, often preventing them from learning to manage their challenges independently.
Helping:
Assists someone in managing their responsibilities.
Supports positive change.
Teaches someone how to stand on their own.
Maintains healthy boundaries.
Encourages better decision-making.
Helping is hard. Helping is caring. Helping is an investment. Helping is coaching, training, and mentoring.
Enabling:
Diminishes the consequences of poor behavior.
Reinforces unhealthy habits.
Prevents someone from learning to manage their problems.
Allows standards and expectations to decline.
Every time you walk by something, you enable bad behaviors or lower standards.
Let’s apply this to a retail environment:
Helping might look like showing one of your leaders how to prioritize their tasks and activities during a busy week or season. You provide ideas, ask questions, guide them in organizing their workflow, and provide tools or techniques they can use moving forward. It may sound something like this, “Let’s discuss how you are already approaching this. What thoughts do you have on what should happen first? What might be next? How can you ensure these will get completed on a timely basis? Could you leverage additional people on the team to help complete these items? What will that look like?”
Enabling could involve reassigning their work to others because they feel overwhelmed or giving them a pass on completing the activity. While this may seem supportive, it ultimately avoids addressing the root issue and prevents them from developing the necessary skills. This scenario may sound something like, “I understand it is busy, and you are trying to catch up on many different things. Why don’t you work on catching up? We’ll discuss this next time. In the meantime, I’ll have Sue from the other store come over and get some of these other items completed. Does that take the pressure off?”
Accountability: The Foundation of Helping
Accountability often gets a bad reputation as something punitive or harsh, but at its core, it’s about doing what you say you will do. I previously wrote about this in “Accountability is Not a Four-Letter Word.” Accountability ensures that people fulfill their commitments, which is directly tied to the distinction between helping and enabling.
When you help, you set clear expectations and hold your team to the standard of meeting them. This fosters ownership and growth. When you enable, you accept excuses or even create excuses for others. This erodes accountability and creates a cycle where standards decline, performance suffers, and trust within the team breaks down.
Enabling can be sneaky. On the surface, it may appear you’re helping and supporting your team. Underneath, however, enabling leads to unmet expectations, slipping standards, and a lack of personal accountability. Over time, this can damage team morale, increase turnover, and create a culture where top performers leave for better opportunities.
In short, own the issue, discuss how to improve, and move on.
How Can You Do More Helping and Less Enabling?
If you’re unsure whether your actions are helping or enabling, consider these strategies:
Engage in Partnerships, Not Rescue Missions Working together with your team creates a sense of partnership. Helping is about guiding and coaching, not solving their problems for them. Telling someone what to do or taking over their responsibilities leads to dependence and frustration. Instead, ask questions and involve them in finding solutions. Example: instead of taking on an associate’s difficult task yourself, walk them through how to break it down into manageable steps. By doing this, you’re empowering them to succeed next time.
Replay Your Conversations Reflect on recent coaching moments. Were you solving problems for your team to make them feel better? Were you shielding them from the consequences of their actions? Empathy and support are critical, but they must be paired with accountability. Ensure your coaching conversations include actionable takeaways and clear next steps.
Set Clear Expectations Helping starts with clarity. Ensure your team understands what is expected of them and why it matters. When expectations are clear, it becomes easier to identify when someone is struggling and address it in a way that promotes growth rather than avoidance.
Ask More, Tell Less Coaching is about asking open-ended questions that encourage reflection and ownership. For example, ask, “What could you do differently to prevent this from happening again?” instead of telling them what they should do. This approach helps your team develop critical thinking skills and confidence.
Maintain Healthy Boundaries Recognize when you’re stepping too far into someone’s responsibilities. Helping is about supporting, not doing the work for them. Set boundaries allowing your team to grow while providing the guidance they need.
Closing Thoughts
Helping builds a stronger, more capable team over time. Leadership isn’t about solving every problem for your team. It’s about guiding them to find solutions themselves. By focusing on helping rather than enabling, you’ll create a culture of accountability, empowerment, and growth, a culture where people thrive, and results follow.
As you lead, ask yourself: “Am I solving their problem for them, or am I helping them learn to solve it themselves?” That question can make all the difference in how you show up as a leader and in the results your team delivers.
How will you ensure you are a ‘helping’ leader and not one that is enabling others to not reach their full potential?
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