Here's how you can build trust in your employees for effective delegation.

Building rapport with your employees is essential for establishing trust. Take the time to understand them on a personal level, recognizing their strengths, weaknesses, and professional goals. This personal investment demonstrates that you value them as individuals, not just as workers. It fosters a sense of belonging and loyalty, which is crucial when delegating important tasks. Regular one-on-one meetings are an excellent way to maintain this connection and create a space for open communication. By building strong relationships, you ensure that your employees feel trusted and empowered to take on responsibilities effectively.

If you have been reluctant to delegate, your team members may sense that you don't like giving up control, and may be way outside their comfort zone when you assign them a task. Ensure they understand the task, the scope, the tools, the process, the deadline, and of course the overall context. Get them to repeat it back to you to be sure. Then just leave them to it for a bit, but schedule a check-in way ahead of the due date to ensure all is on track. Don't just consider that the task is now theirs and that's the end of the matter.

Setting expectations is everything if you're the same person all the time and you're clear about what your work ethic is and your goals and what the company's goals and direction is AND how and why that benefits the employee then they'll be motivated Production is a direct result of motivation If people are aligned with the mission have clear expectations so they come prepared and they're not thrown off guard If you're building people versus tasking people which means putting healthy pressure daily strict deadlines and overall encouraging people to grow consistently every day then people will go to war with you.

When assigning any task, provide a process on how it has been done to date, or how you expect it to be done. That can be some freeform bullet points, just some structure to guide them. Encourage them to review the process and suggest improvements, which you review afterwards and then feed back into the process for next time. The next time assign the task to someone else. This shares the skills, but also validates the process.

The best approach is to delegate responsibility downward to those who push accountability upwards. That means employees should take risks, make mistakes, yet own them and show consistent upward value creation. Good managers don’t focus on failures unless they are catastrophic or habitual. Net value creation is greater than the sum of the organizational parts.

It's hard to encourage autonomy from the outset if you have been reluctant to adopt delegation to date. You probably don't like giving up control. Perhaps you're afraid that the task won't be done the right way - your way. Give them the process steps for how it has been done to date, even just some bullet points. Then encourage them to own the process, refine it, and suggest improvements. This gives you a balance between empowering them and ensuring they don't go off and reinvent the wheel.

Definitely want to recognize effort At the end of the day "people only care how much you know until they know how much you care" When you tell somebody great job even if it sounds corny or it's forced people more appreciate the fact that you took the effort to do it and especially if your genuine about it. Don't just tell them good job the old school corny way "Way to hit a home run Slugger". 😆 Tell them " Hey name I like the way you did X especially because with taking Y into consideration most people would have done Z but you responded well to adversity and came through with an even better job than most people. Pretty cool to see. I appreciate the extra effort. How do YOU feel about the result" Now it's an engaging conversation

Provide regular feedback with each team member. Let each one know what they are doing well and where and how they can improve.