5 ways to gain your team’s trust

If people can count on you to consistently deliver, you’ll go very far. It’s almost like an unfair advantage.

Here’s something I’ve learned about trust.

If people can count on you to consistently deliver, you’ll go very far. It’s like having an unfair advantage.

When I was working at a small rapidly-growing startup a year or two back, we had many large and complex projects to build that had tight timelines.

I ended up becoming known as the person who would deliver consistently. People would say things like: “Oh, let’s give that to Caleb. It’s a high-profile challenging project that really needs to be done well and delivered on time.”

This led to massive growth for myself personally, and ultimately 3 promotions/role-changes and compensation increases in 3 years time.

How did I earn that reputation?

By earning the trust of my team, my managers, and my company’s leadership.

Here are 5 ways you can do the same.

1. Deliver value consistently

It’s very simple, just not easy.

Keep showing up. Be consistent.

And no, I’m not talking about constant overdrive crazy hustling, earning brownie points. But consistent delivery of value to the teams and companies you work with.

Consistently showing up again and again really adds up.

• It’s how you earn the trust of your leadership

• It’s how you start getting handed challenging projects

• It’s how you grow and learn interesting new things

For me it’s always been a balance between hustling and consistency.

Sometimes, I’ve totally needed to hustle, and it’s paid off well for me. Here’s a story of how I hustled massively on a take home project and beat out 100s of other engineers applying for the position.

But that hasn’t worked well for me long term. I’ve often gotten stuck or burned out with what I call “random hustling.” The kind where you spend 5 hrs on a course one weekend and then don’t touch it for another 3 weeks.

What has worked for me is slow and steady consistency.

The tortoise and the hare kid’s book taught me a valuable lesson: The tortoise always wins the race. 🐢 🥇

Now I value consistency + a little hustle, over random crazy burnout hustling.

It’s been paying off for me.

2. Honor your commitments

If people can count on you to honor your commitments – to do what you said you will do – you’ll go far.

• I’ll have that to you by eod – make sure they have it.

• I’ll own creating that ticket – do they always follow up because you forget?

• I’ve got oncall for you – but then when you are paged, you are awol?

If you are flaky, inconsistent, and don’t keep people informed on your progress, it will be hard for leaders to trust you.

If your leaders don’t feel like they can trust you, they will pass you over for interesting and challenging projects that are key to your growth in the company.

Honor your commitments and you will become very trusted, and quickly grow the ranks wherever you work.

3. Speak up when something is off

It’s so easy when something goes off the rails to go into “dark hustling mode.”

Working overtime till 2 am and on the weekends to try and catch up without telling anyone on your team, just to get that one project done on time.

I’ve done this too many times, and it’s lead to burnout, and leaders being frustrated because they didn’t have visibility into where I was spending my time.

So here’s what I recommend now.

Do your best, to hit estimates and goals – but if you can’t accomplish something on time – Say something. Speak up early!

Don’t silently suffer trying to hit an unrealistic deadline you set months ago. Raise a flag and ask for some help.

There are many levers a good engineering manager and business can use to help get the project on track. eg.

• Cutting project scope

• Pushing out the launch deadline

• Adding more engineers to the project

• Projecting you and the team from interruptions

Part of being reliable and trustworthy is speaking up when something is unrealistic. Good leaders will always appreciate it.

Again, it helps you earn trust.

4. Provide creative solutions

It’s easy to raise a blocker when something unexpected comes up. I’ve often caught myself saying: “There’s no way we can do that.”

However, this often rubs leaders the wrong way.

They will just hear you telling them “no” without providing reasoning and giving suggestions for alternatives.

Our business and product leaders have customer / internal agreements they have to meet somehow. So to them there are times where “no” truly isn’t an option.

What is an option is pulling some levers to get the project back on track. And you can help with that.

Here’s a pro tip: 💡

Anytime you raise a blocker. Come with a few creative ideas on how we might be able meet the original business goals.

Maybe that’s:

• Having someone manually do work instead of coding it up

• Rolling out an MVP, and adding lower priority features later on

• Starting with a simpler system, and scaling up if needed when traffic grows

A good way to share blockers might be:

“We are still on track to hit most of our core goals, but a few things came up that took longer than expected. Can we talk about priorities and discuss some things we can shift around to make sure we stay laser focused on our top goals?”

Or something similar where you work together through the blockers to make sure the top priorities of the project stay on track if at all possible.

5. Give accurate updates

Good leaders care more about reliable, accurate updates – knowing where the project actually is at – than you working overtime to meet unrealistic deadlines.

So when you give estimates for projects be sure to include all the work to really do your best work. Including:

• Writing tests

• Writing a technical spec

• Adding API documentation

• Working through the small bugs that always come up

The worst thing you can do is underestimate your work, plan to work overtime to “earn brownie points,” and then do a bunch of invisible work and burnout.

Don’t do that. I’ve done it before, and it usually ends poorly.

Do your best to break down a complex projects into small understandable chunks, and estimate them reasonably to the best of your ability.

If something runs off track, or takes longer go back to step 3 – speak up!

Conclusion

Well I hope that demystifies how to build the trust and respect of your team.

To review:

• Deliver value consistently

• Honor your commitments

• Speak up when something is off

• Provide creative solutions with blockers

• Give accurate estimates

Following this framework has led to massive personal growth and I’m excited to see how it will for you as well.

Remember, steady and consistent wins the race. 🐢🚀

You can do this! I believe in you.

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If I missed anything, or you’d like to share something that’s worked well for you, I’d love to hear from you. Send me a note or leave a comment!

Until next week 👇🏼

– Caleb Mellas

Catch me daily on LinkedIn and Twitter.