I have had the opportunity to observe several managers in my career but I have never been one myself. So, you should take the following advice with a pinch of salt.
Let’s start by defining trust. My favorite definition of trust comes from The Thin Book Of Trust; An Essential Primer for Building Trust at Work.
“Trust – choosing to risk making something you value vulnerable to another person’s actions.”
In addition to defining trust, the book offers four assessments (dimensions) that people typically use to decide if they should trust someone. So, what this means is the choice to trust someone depends on the following dimensions. These are:
- Sincerity – the quality of being open and truthful; not deceitful or hypocritical
- Reliability – the quality of being dependable
- Competence – the quality of being adequately or well qualified
- Care – the quality of being concerned with one’s well-being
Now that we have a framework for determining the choice to trust someone, we can come up some approaches to build trust along these dimensions. The most important thing to remember is that different people respond to different approaches (mostly a combination of several approaches). So, good managers have more than one approach at their disposal and are quick to figure out the right approach for the individual.
Here are a few approaches to build trust (along the above dimensions):
1. Sincerity
I like managers who speak their mind and are willing to express unpopular opinions. It demonstrates that they have taken the time to form their own opinions and are also willing to express them and they trust you to not share it with others. By being open and direct, they set an example for how their reports should interact with them. If an individual doesn’t feel like their manager is being entirely honest with them, it is hard to get them to open up and share what’s on their mind when it’s their turn. So, you could end up spending a lot of time in 1:1 meetings talking about the superficial issues without ever getting to the meaty ones. In general, it is a good idea for managers to always go first and set the tone for any interaction since the reports don’t always know how much to share and err on the side of caution.
There are plenty of other ways to demonstrate sincerity. Some of them are:
- Actively communicating their actions (even those that they don’t think is relevant to everyone)
- Seeking feedback on things that affect everyone on the team
- Being vocally self-critical (aka owning up to their mistakes)
- Actively seeking out and appreciating silent contributions from team members (this is really powerful but very few managers do this)
2. Reliability
“My manager ALWAYS has my back. Even if I screw up. Especially when I screw up since I can rely on my manager to help me fix the situation.”
If you are a manager, a good way to assess how you fare on the reliability metric is to think about the last time one of your reports had a major problem and how quickly they came to you with it. If they trust you, then you should have known about the problem as soon as it happened. If you knew about the problem after it escalated into a major issue, then that’s bad. It is even worse if you heard about it from someone else.
So, how can a manager get someone to trust them with their problems? The only way is to demonstrate how you would handle the situation when it happens the first time (either with that individual or with other individuals on the team). A couple of years ago, I remember this one time where I made a huge miscalculation about what the rate limits should be for an API. This ended up causing a lot of customer impact and we had to roll-back the change causing delays to other teams. Since this was my first big mistake, I panicked a lot and wasn’t sure how to proceed. But my manager was very calm and he started brainstorming solutions with me. From being too scared to think, I was now beginning to regain confidence and was able to come up with a couple of options. I did not feel blamed at any point during this exercise. This whole experience taught me to trust my manager with future problems knowing that he was someone that I could rely on.
Here are some other ways to demonstrate reliability:
- Do what you say i.e. if you say you are going to follow-up with another team, then do it.
3. Competence
As a manager, are you good at what you do? More importantly, do your reports think that you are good at what you do? If you are not good at what you do, there are no quick solutions. You just need to invest a lot of effort into improving yourself. But if you think are good at what you do, then it should be fairly easy to convince others of the same provided you can offer the evidence of it so it can be evaluated by others.
In essence, a manager should be able to get things done to help the team operate efficiently. If there are constant pain points that affect the team or individuals, you should be resolving them or at least taking active steps to resolve them. Ask each of your team members the following question:
“Have I have solved any important problem for you or the team in the last six months?”
If even half of the team cannot think of something substantial, then you have a problem. It could mean one or more of the following:
- they don’t come to you with problems (could be related to above point on reliability)
- you are not solving problems that are important to them
- you are solving problems (or taking steps) but not communicating it back to them
Once you figure out the root cause, you can take steps to address it. The sign of success in this dimension is when team members thank you personally for the problems you have solved for them. If team members wonder about what you do on a daily basis, then you are not adding tangible value in their mind. To be clear, not all of a manager’s contributions need to be/will be visible to team members but they need to see enough of those to trust you with their problems.
4. Care
One of my favorite managers had an interesting approach to offering life/career advice. He would sometimes make two suggestions, usually conflicting ones. It would go something like this:
“As your manager, I think the next step for you should be to work on project X. But if I was not your manager, I would say you should probably move to team Y and work on project Z instead since that is more in line with your interests.”
In my head, this roughly translates to:
“I have certain responsibilities as a manager to manage the business. So, I can use you as a resource to meet those objectives. But since I care about you as a person, I am willing to put your career interests above those of the business.”
It might seem strange in most company cultures for a manager to put people above business. But that would be a very short-sighted view. For me, this one interaction was enough to establish trust with my manager. By demonstrating that he cared about me, he was able to get more out of me since I did not want to let my manager down. So, the end result was that I was even more motivated to do a good job with all my responsibilities knowing that my manager had my best interests at heart. In hindsight, this sounds so obvious but I haven’t see too many managers use this approach successfully. One possible reason why this is hard to replicate is that the words don’t mean much in isolation. If my manager hadn’t fared well along other dimensions, just saying these words wouldn’t have meant much. So, for instance, if I didn’t think my manager was sincere, I wouldn’t have taken those words seriously.
Here are some other approaches for demonstrating care:
- Always keep your 1:1 meetings with your reports. Reschedule if necessary but never cancel since it sends the message that you don’t care about them enough.
- Get to know them on a personal level i.e. what are their hobbies, about their family etc.
Building trust between any two individuals is a two-way street. The value of building trust is something that is hard to explain and needs to be experienced. Trust leads to more open and direct communication essentially helping us understand one another’s motivations better. Since there is an inherent power imbalance in the manager-report relationship, managers have a greater responsibility to take the necessary steps to build trust with their reports. Knowing how to build trust is a very necessary skill and it should be taught to all managers!