A leader’s trust becomes useful through the decisions another person is allowed to make.

Saying you trust someone costs nothing and proves nothing. Trust becomes real at the moment a decision leaves your hands and stays gone: the choice they make without checking, the spend they approve, the direction they set that you then live with. Until that happens, what you have is warm language on top of an unchanged arrangement, and the person can feel the difference.

Pick one decision this month and hand it over completely, including the right to get it wrong. Say out loud where their authority begins and ends. Then hold to it when their choice differs from yours, since that is the only moment the trust actually exists.