What can software leaders do to fully empower their staff to make their own decisions? What barriers can you remove to help them be more independent?

This is tricky because at its root, the hesitation to drive decision-making is often rooted in a fear of (public) failure.

A tactical answer would be to set up a RACI with very clear swimlanes about who can make what decisions.

SAFe actually has some interesting things to say about this. They've locked down their site to subscribers only, but this YouTube does a pretty good job overviewing the principle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJtgLUqInGc

There may be an element here of sharing out when decisions are made by 'lower level' team members- elevating that behavioral norm.

But the real shift here comes after enough trial and error and visible displays of people not being penalized for making the 'wrong' decision. The hesitation to make decisions is an emotional issue, as much as an intellectual one. It starts with leadership not shying away from 'failure' and reframing failure as an opportunity to learn (especially if you fail fast, learn, move ahead) and being clear that failure isn't always failure- often there are new insights to gain.

The reality is, very small percentage of people really want to take on the accountability part of leadership. And exposing people to that makes many feel uncomfortable - hence the drive to make any critical decision colloquially, or engaging a team, is so prevalent.

So one good thing to do is to make it clear that humans have right to make a mistake. That this is normal and not just possible, but implied and understood as part of growth. And consequently, as errors are permitted, it is as important to provide guardrails and means for recovery when mistakes are made.

Ultimately, learning by error shall be always turned into a coaching opportunity - thus instead of the sense of guilt it will help personal and professional evolution, and allow to step up the responsibility going further.