Today I met a friend who has left his job only months after joining. His team lead had huge trust issues. Everything had to flow through him. He made all the decisions. There was a lot of frustration when people were proactive. I’m surprised he spent that long in this environment at all. However, it got me thinking, how do you work through situations like this?
Despite all the corporate mumbo jumbo people utter, it often comes down to groups of people not trusting newcomers. “You must earn our trust”, is something I’ve been told.
How do you build trust when you are the newbie?
There are some basic things you can do. While I am not very structured in how I interact, upon reflection, most of what I do fall into these areas.
❶ Talk to people. Learn about their lives. Be curious about them. This is by far the biggest step you can take towards building trust in any relationship. Show them pictures of your family. Most people I work with have seen my dog 😆. I figured, do I really need to build trust with someone if they dislike dogs?
❷ Emulate them a little. Learn the lingo. Build some familiarity between you and them. People come together because they have a shared identity or history or something. Learn about that and respect their ways. If they like to name their pull requests a certain way, definitely don’t send them a link on how to do it better.
❸ But of course, be yourself. Again… in small chunks. You are not going to swear like a sailor on your first date, so don’t do the same at work either. I mean, sometimes that will speed things up if you “met your peoples”. Unlikely. What has worked for me is to tell bosses that we are not going to standardise measuring velocity or report on story points. Gotta draw the line somewhere. I draw it at bullshit people metrics.
Over time, when there is enough shared understanding, you can take the next steps towards bigger things.
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