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    • Action plan

    Building trust in your employees

    Medium effort

    High impact

    Trusting others in your organisation to do a job as well as you could is a challenge for many business leaders. While it’s normal to feel like you know your business better than anyone, a lack of trust often creates issues. Failing to delegate or properly leverage your in-house expertise can result in underperformance and you risk burning out from juggling too many responsibilities.

    • We’ve designed our action plans to be completed in the order of steps laid out and explained why each step is important
    • Customising your action plan lets you set your own completion dates, assign tasks to others and get notifications
    • Helpful tools are provided for certain steps while a tracking metric at the end will help you determine the long-term success of your effort
    • A downloadable PDF version of each action plan is available if you’d like to compete it offline
    What's involved? Ways to use this action plan Measuring impact
    1

    Spend time reflecting on the skills and capabilities of your employees, thinking about successful projects they’ve managed or training courses they’ve completed

    Impact: medium

    Why will this help?

    Taking a step back and recognising the skills and talent you’ve got in the business is a good first step in building up trust.

    2

    Complete a skills gap exercise that identifies your own strengths and weaknesses

    Impact: medium

    Why will this help?

    Completing a skills gap exercise will help you confront your own weaknesses and realise where others could contribute or improve on your efforts.

    Identifying the skills gaps you have as a leader

    Being self-aware empowers business leaders to grow and improve. Our easy-to-follow checklist can be used to identify your skills gaps.
    3

    Based on your assessment of your skills gaps, choose three tasks that you want to delegate to employees

    Impact: medium

    Why will this help?

    Delegation is a great way to prove to staff – and yourself – that you can trust others to complete work as well as you could.

    4

    Work through a delegation checklist to ensure employees have everything they need to carry out the task successfully

    Impact: high

    Why will this help?

    Successful delegation hinges on providing the right amount of information and support. Make sure you’re giving them the best chance from the start.

    Check employees have everything they need when delegating

    Successful delegation is all in the preparation. Work through our checklist when delegating tasks to make sure employees have everything they need to complete the work to a high standard.
    5

    Delegate three tasks and build trust with employees by providing the feedback, support and training they need to excel

    Impact: high

    Why will this help?

    Staff will need extra support when they first take on something new. Don’t write off the first mistake and assume they can’t be trusted – work on nurturing them in these roles and they will almost certainly reward your trust.

    Building your mindset to trust your team

    Business leaders need to be able to delegate with confidence, which means it’s essential that they can trust their team. If you can develop that mindset, you’ll be able to work more effectively and empower the people around you.

    What can I do with this Action Plan?

    Start this Action Plan

    Add some extra information to this plan and we’ll help you get it done.

    • We’ve designed our action plans to be completed in the order of steps laid out and explained why each step is important
    • Customising your action plan lets you set your own completion dates, assign tasks to others and get notifications
    • Helpful tools are provided for certain steps while a tracking metric at the end will help you determine the long-term success of your effort
    • A downloadable PDF version of each action plan is available if you’d like to compete it offline

    Download and print

    Get a printable template for this Action Plan, fill it in with some target dates, and share it with your team. Pin it on the wall where everyone can see it.

    Get the printable Action Plan

    Learning Groups

    We also run Learning Groups on these topics where you can join other leaders tackling the same challenges.

    Find a Learning Group

    How will I know if my action plan is working?

    Number of delegated tasks

    The tasks you were responsible for that you’ve been able to give to employees

    Why this metric?

    The number of tasks you delegate is a good indicator of how much you trust employees to take on extra responsibilities.

    How do I start tracking?

    Keep track of which tasks you’ve delegated each month. After six months, reflect on whether that number has increased or decreased over time – if it’s decreased, think about why that’s the case and whether there’s more work to be done.