Selection & Induction: Every relationship begins during the hiring process; that is your opportunity to begin sowing the seeds of trust. It’s your job as a leader to select the right person for the role, ensuring they can do the work and are interested in doing it well. Once you select someone to hire, you have to properly introduce them to the company’s standards for work and behavior in the workplace environment. There’s no one way to do this: introducing someone to factory work on a manufacturing floor is completely different than a remote marketing assistant position. The key is that you effectively introduce the expectations and standards, so your employees can clearly see what work they must produce and how they must behave within the environment.

Deselection & Dismissal: The opposite of hiring is firing. Managerial leaders will need to remove people from their team. That doesn’t always mean termination. Deselection is a tool where an employee remains with the company but moves to a new role that better aligns with their skills or current interests; this could be a manager choosing to step down or an employee moving laterally to a new department. Dismissal, on the other hand, is when an employee is being terminated due to egregious violations of company policy or failure to adhere to the assigned quality standards after being corrected and coached. Dismissal happens, but leaders should always recognize they played a role in the termination: they either selected poorly or inducted poorly, which led to the employee failing in their role. Again, it happens, but you should seek to limit it by conducting thorough, honest interviews and detailed, clear induction plans.

Two-Way Managerial Team Working: You lead a team of subordinates, and your team members may hold completely different roles. You could be leading 6 or more different roles on your team. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have team meetings. These meetings should serve a distinct purpose, such as providing general updates, asking for input/brainstorming, or announcing new processes/changes. Regularly meeting with your entire team is a great way to solidify trust and increase transparency across the various silos you manage.

Coaching: Perhaps the most obvious of the MLPs, coaching is a critical function that leaders should engage in frequently. Most leaders provide coaching every day; smaller teams may see leaders coach less frequently. Regardless of your team size, coaching is the most important daily interaction you can use to build and maintain trust. Coaching is both a skill and an art. You can study different methods or models (I highly recommend the Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier), but you have to find your authentic coaching style and practice it regularly to build your ability.

Personal Effectiveness Appraisal: This is a fancy way of saying performance review. It doesn’t always mean a formal performance review, though. You should be providing your employees with regular appraisals of their current performance. Providing objective performance feedback quarterly, or worse, yearly, is not good enough. You need to provide regular feedback, both praise and corrective coaching, to ensure your employee understands how well they are producing against the assigned outputs.

Task Assignment: The most overlooked and underutilized tool for building trust is the task assignment. Your employees want clarity; they want to know what’s expected and why it’s expected. You should provide all this information when you assign a task. Here’s what I need, here’s why it matters, here’s the level of quality I expect, here’s the due date, and here are your resources. Assigning a task without this information makes it harder for your employee to work autonomously and trust you’ll be satisfied with the results. You may find the output was missed because you failed to clearly assign the task: that’s your opportunity to take ownership instead of providing corrective feedback.

Context Setting: With everything in life, context is king. The more information you can share, the better. You may not be able to share everything, but you shouldn’t seek to maintain power by withholding information. Your employees should understand the reasoning behind the decisions you make. Providing candor increases transparency and helps build trust.

Planning: There are multiple ways to plan, reasons to plan, and ways to track your progress adhering to a plan. The goal of any plan is to try and eliminate as much uncertainty from the future as possible. Cross-training your employees now makes it easier for you to conduct different types of work in the future, making it more certain that you can achieve the overall team goals with more labor trained and able to support. You should incorporate your subordinates into the planning process and focus on producing plans that help you lead better in the future. What you plan and how far into the future you plan are dependent on your role and the assigned outputs you have to achieve.

Merit Review: As a managerial leader, you should look to make recommendations on compensation increases based on your employee’s performance appraisals. While every company has its own policies, trust is built when an employee can see a direct reward commensurate with their level of effort. Nothing makes a high performer more upset than getting the same raise as their less productive peer. It also works best when everyone knows what level of performance they need to achieve to merit additional levels of compensation; transparency is key.

Continual Improvement: With any system, you have to monitor and improve. Every managerial leader must be looking for ways to enhance their own personal operating systems, as well as the company’s systems. You're equipped with the knowledge and awareness to make your team’s processes easier. You should be spending time figuring out ways to make your employees’ workday and processes more efficient. A change in the way breaks are scheduled could easily lead to a huge morale improvement. Looking for improvements is a practice managerial leaders do regularly.

Jaques, E. (1996). Requisite organization: A total system for effective managerial organization and managerial leadership for the 21st century (2nd ed.). Cason Hall & Co.