"Formula" to build the relationships and trust that drive promotions
Trust comes from consistency, sacrifice, and emotional investment.
A reader asked:
"How do you develop relationships and maintain them at early levels of career (IC, manager) and also later when you get into Director and Senior Director levels?"
Relationships have two sides: Being trusted and being liked.
Both are valuable, but we all have that "good time" friend who is fun to hang out with (likable) but not someone we rely upon when the chips are down.
Thus, particularly at work, trust is the more important of the two.
3 parts to building trust (quickly) that cover a spectrum from the rational to the emotional.
The most rational is being reliable. A good definition of trust is "consistency over time." As you make commitments and deliver on them, you earn trust.
The far end of the spectrum is the emotional side, being likable. Actually caring about the good of the other person. We trust people who care about us and who clearly have our best interests at heart.
In the middle is what I call sacrifice, you can also call difficulty. We trust more deeply those who have done obviously hard things for us. Things that cost them. Think of the bonds between soldiers who served together in war. The difficulty, stakes, and level of sacrifice matter.
In summary, to earn trust quickly, be open and authentic, deliver what you say, and step up to the hard challenges.
I wrote about how I earned back trust after I personally disappointed Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos (it was not easy).
Once you build trust, you can maintain it with less frequent contact, but relationships do require "relating." Once trust is built (earned) through actions, it is maintained more through contact (which keeps memories and feelings fresh).
You can also accelerate relationship-building in social settings.
Office hierarchy can create artificial behaviors.
Sharing meals (food) for example, speaks to a primal, tribal connection.
This is why team events, team dinners, and taking sales prospects out on the town are all time-honored tools - they set the stage for relationships and trust.
If you are new to leadership, I co-wrote the 10 hard truths about tech leadership with a former Twitch colleague.
2 follow-up reader questions:
Q1: How would you overcome building trust with someone who is just looking at themselves in a selfish way and does not value your efforts in the 3 buckets?
Best option: Get away / leave / find better people.
Workable option: Show them how you can help them meet their goals. Even evil overlords tend to value their sidekicks to some extent. Selfish people still want help, and still do favors for those they help. It is more transactional...the implied deal is "I'm selfish so you must be too. So if you are helping me, you are expecting to be paid in favors. You are good at helping me, so I will pay you in some favors." This is not a great relationship...but it can be survivable while you look for a way to exercise the best option.
Q2: There's obvious tenure bias, due to criteria 1. Does this inadvertently cause a crony culture where newcomers find it hard to break into circles of trust?
Old-timer bias is trust over time.
People have gotten familiar and comfortable with each other and they struggle to extend the same trust to newcomers.
2 lessons:
Go someplace, if you can, where others are new too so that you have equal footing.
If you cannot do this, realize it will take dramatic efforts to break through, and this may include a specific conversation with a leader about their need to make an effort to extend trust. And if they cannot, you may need to leave.
Note. I get a lot of questions asking about a systematic way for career advancement. I wrote a guest post in Lenny’s Newsletter detailing The Magic Loop: A framework for rapid career growth. Many have found it useful.
Audience Insights
I have consolidated additional ideas worth considering from my LinkedIn audience, including:
When someone helps you (e.g. onboarding buddy, introduces to stakeholders, pulls you into a meeting for exposure), close the loop with that person and tell them what you learned, what you did, and ask how you can help them. Most people fail on closing the loop.
Vulnerability is another key element (espcially for leaders) in building trust. Leaders who are not afraid to admit, "I don't have all the answers" or "I messed up" cultivate an atmosphere of transparency, ownership over missteps, and helps speed their team’s learning curve.
Get promoted from Senior Manager to Executive
“What does a great executive look like?”
That is a common question I get.
To get to the executive level, you must excel in 3 levels:
Personal Executive Performance. You must be a scaled deep leader (hardest to do), a change agent, and a trusted decision maker (most important).
Team Level Executive Performance. Your team must execute with little oversight, take calculated risks, and deliver results.
Company Level Executive Performance. You must think strategically, enhance the whole company, and be known as an influential communicator and leader.
If you want to make the jump to executive, I am teaching a live online class from Sept. 11-14 via Maven. Click here for details.
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Level Up is a free newsletter from retired Amazon Vice President Ethan Evans that breaks down how he succeeded and how you can get to the next level.