How to build and maintain trust with anyone
Knowing how to build and maintain trust has been the best career catalyst for me. I managed to navigate two acquisitions and grow from a Junior Engineer role to an Engineering Director in under a decade. It was a journey of accelerated growth with a lot of challenges.
Let’s first see why trust is such an important element in our society.
Thousands of years ago, if somebody new were joining a tribe, two things would have mattered the most:
- If they were competent — good hunters for that time, able to provide for people in the tribe
- If they were trustworthy — they would not run away with the tribe’s food and/or kill everybody in their sleep.
The same is valid today. Whenever somebody joins a new environment, the question on everyone’s subconscious mind is the same:
Is that person competent and trustworthy?
While most people focus on improving competency, trustworthiness is essential.
In the age of AI, the barrier to competence in any field will be getting lower and lower. Expertise will become a commodity because you can ask AI bot X any question and get an expert answer.
Knowing how to become trustworthy will be the biggest competitive advantage in the era of advanced AIs.
Knowing how to build and keep trust is essential. This will help you if you either want to grow your career or if you are a business owner and need to get clients and partners to work with you.
I thought I was doing a good job when I started my professional journey. Even if I was only starting, my career ambition was to grow into a leadership role. Being in a startup made it easy to get more responsibility. I was stretching outside my comfort zone.
I thought things were going well because tasks were getting done until one day. My manager took me aside and said we needed to talk in his office. I could tell from his tone that he was very…