By Cassie Solomon, RACI Solutions
In our first blog in this series, we introduced the STN Model of Empowerment — Skill, Trust, and Novelty — and dove deep into the first element - Skill. We looked at the Dreyfus Model and what it means to delegate something to a Novice and why that’s very different from delegating to someone with more experience. Today, we're turning to the second dimension – Trust.
We originally called this element of the model “Relationship”. But in working with clients, we discovered that word is too vague. It sounds like tenure, or likeability, or how many years you've worked together. What we actually mean is Trust — and that's the word we'll use going forward. The "T" in STN. (More on Novelty in our next post.)
So, what is trust, exactly?
The academic literature has a wonderful definition of Trust. It’s NOT a warm and fuzzy feeling! It's also not binary - something you either have or don't have. Trust is something you construct — through a series of experiences that accumulate over time. Think about your own work relationships. You trust people who have consistently done what they said they would do, who told you the truth when they made a mistake, and who exercised sound judgment in the past. Those experiences build a track record — and that track record builds the trust. It can even work in the opposite direction – you can “trust” that someone will be late for meetings, that they will contradict their instructions, or that they will let you down when you are under a deadline. When you accumulate negative experiences, you change your expectations (downward). If that person wants to regain your positive trust, they will need to build a different track record with you, which will take time.
This has direct implications for empowerment. When your goal is to move an "A" to the edge of the organization — giving others real decision-making authority — you are making a prediction based on your trust in that person. The question the STN model encourages you to ask is simply: do you have enough experience with this person – a track record – to fully empower them?
Trust works both ways
Here's the part leaders often miss: trust must flow both ways for empowerment to work. The manager has to trust the employee's judgment — that's obvious. But the employee also has to trust the manager. They need to believe that when they make a decision in good faith and it doesn't go perfectly, the manager will back them up rather than quietly take the "A" back. “It was easier to finish it correctly myself” is a form of abdication. If you retrieve the work from others, they will eventually become more passive and defer upward — no matter what the RACI chart says.
This is why empowerment initiatives often fail even when managers want to delegate more "A's". The project structure changes; the trust infrastructure doesn't.
Build the Trust Account deliberately
Trust is built through experience, which means you can consciously design the experiences that produce it. That might look like: checking in with your employee after you hand off a decision to offer coaching and feedback, then supporting the employee when peers or stakeholders push back. Or debriefing after a high-stakes decision — not to second-guess, but to learn together. Each of those moments deposits something into the trust account.
The good news: this is learnable and manageable. You don't have to wait for trust to develop organically. You can sequence it intentionally, decision by decision — moving the "A" a little further out each time the track record supports it.
In our next blog in this series, we'll cover Novelty and complete the model — what happens when the work itself is new, when you are innovating – when you and your most skilled and trusted people don’t know what the end game should look like.
