How to Quickly Gain Trust and Confidence in a New Job

Episode Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Daring to Succeed podcast.

My name is Julianna Yau Yorgan and I’m a workplace strategist who helps introverts reach their career goals with personalized strategies that work with their introversion, not against it.

Today, I’m going to talk about how to gain trust and confidence with a new group of people at work.

We’ll look at how I did this with a past client of mine and how you can apply the same strategies for yourself.

Sherri had just gotten her first job as a project manager, joined a new team and was working with a lot of people who didn’t know her.

Both the work and the field of expertise was new for her, so although her new boss could see that her skills were transferable, there were a lot of “new” things stacked against her.

And if that wasn’t enough, the new role was temporary while her boss worked on getting buy-in to secure it as a permanent role.

So when Sherri came to me, she knew she needed to get up and running fast, convince this new group of people that she could do the job, that they could trust her, and that they would want to keep her permanently.

Within weeks she was running steering committee meetings, meeting with executives one on one, and had gained the trust and buy-in of her peers.

How did we do this?

First, we looked at the people she had to work with and figured out who’s trust she needed to gain and how hard it would be to gain it.

This became a prioritized list of who’s trust she needed to focus on first, since it wasn’t realistic for her to work on everyone at the same time.

You can do this too by creating a list of the people whose trust you need to gain, why their trust is important, and how easy it is to gain their trust.

For example, she had a co-Project Manager who wanted and needed to trust her, so it would be easier to gain his trust.

She also needed his trust early on so that they could collaborate easily.

But there was a stakeholder whose trust didn’t come easily but had a lot of influence.

So even though it would be difficult to gain his trust, she knew she needed to get it.

Once you have your list, you can then prioritize the people whose trust is most critical.

Be sure to avoid the temptation to leave the ones who are difficult to convince until the end.

You’ll typically need more time to build that relationship and their trust.

If you have anyone on the list who has a lot of influence on others (especially people who are difficult to gain trust with), I recommend prioritizing them so they can help you get the others on board.

The second thing we did was create individual strategies for each person on her list.

This may sound like a lot of work, but these strategies don’t need to be complicated—they just need to be specific to the person.

For example, we figured out that her co-Project Manager preferred not to take the lead on big group conversations.

So part of her strategy for him was to ask if she could take the lead, then do it.

And with that stakeholder who had a lot of influence but didn’t trust easily, we figured out that he liked to be the go-to person for his opinion…but didn’t like to make the final decision.

So part of her strategy for him was to go to him first with any decisions, ask for his opinion, then give him lots of credit when she shared his opinion.

You can also take a more strategic approach with gaining trust by figuring out how your co-workers prefer to work, then helping create an environment that meets their needs.

By no means do you need to bend over backwards to make it all about them…

…but as you can see from Sherri’s examples, it’s possible to create simple and ethical adjustments to how you work with them to better meet their needs.

This is such an important part of building trust with someone, because they’ll let down their guard when they know they can rely on you and that you won’t bulldoze them to get the work done.

The third thing I did for Sherri was support her through her technical development.

Because the role was new to her, it was critical that she could actually do the job—not just “win over” a bunch of people.

I mean, that trust would disappear pretty quickly if she couldn’t actually deliver.

Similar to her plan with her co-workers, we figured out what skills were most critical that she didn’t already have, and what she was worried about the most.

If you’re putting together this list for yourself, remember that what you’re most worried about might not be the same as a skill you’re not good at.

In fact, you might be good at something, but you’re not meeting your own expectations of doing that thing.

It doesn’t matter if your boss or stakeholders think you’re doing fine.

If you think you need to do better, honour that so that you can meet your own expectations quickly to reach the level of confidence that you need.

For example, Sherri worried about not being able to answer questions posed to her from her meeting participants.

Rather than being her cheerleader to say that she didn’t have to worry about it, I worked with her to come up with as many questions as she could think of—then come up with answers to all of them.

Now, some of those answers were just “that’s on my list and I can get you that information this afternoon”…

…but she needed that level of preparation to feel confident.

So that’s exactly what we prepared.

So if you’re in a new role and are trying to figure out where to focus your development, start with what worries you the most.

Remember that confidence comes from within, and only you know what you need to feel confident.

So that’s it!

With the odds almost stacked against her, Sherri was acing her job within weeks and built her own confidence within a few months of her new job.

From the work we did together, she even landed a very high profile project whose primary stakeholder was a senior executive of the company.

You can do the same by
-prioritizing the people whose confidence and trust you need to gain,
-coming up with strategic approaches for each person,
-and focusing on what you know you need to increase your own confidence.

And if you’ve just landed a new job or joined a new team (or both) and want to get ramped up quickly, I can help you by creating your own career ramp-up strategy.

You can learn more on my website or connect with me for more details.

I’ll drop the links to my website and socials in the show notes.

Okay, that’s all for now.

See you next time!