I trust you.
When someone says “I trust you”, they really mean it. It is definitely not granted by the words spoken but with actions taken.
As an engineering manager, don’t expect you’ll be trusted from day 1. There will be all sorts of questions and doubts from everyone around. Your manager doubts, “Will you deliver?”, “Can you improve the team's collaboration and engagement?” “Will you do the prioritization right?”. Your direct reports doubt, “Will you help me in their career growth?”, “Can you be trusted to discuss their personal situation and challenges?”, “Can I expect regular feedback on how I work and what to improve?”. Your stakeholders doubt “Can I trust the timeline committed?” “Will I be informed if there is a delay in delivery?”
You have to show your credibility and invest in building relationships from the ground up. Showing genuine care and empathy for people around you, being committed and consistent in what you say / what you do and being authentic are exemplification of trust.
It takes time to build trust. It is like playing a cup stacking game. You need patience to build by stacking cups so that it won’t fall off but it takes seconds to break. Once a trust is broken, it takes more time to rebuild than you would imagine.
Building Trust
Building trust is all about being consistent in your behavior, sticking to promises made and ultimately delivering it. Can one deliver every time as per promise made? - Maybe not. Especially not in the engineering world. That’s where transparency, over-communication and being vulnerable will increase your trust score.
Best feeling you can give to them is that you're one of them and not someone who works at a different level and always has other priorities and your own problems.
Get to know each other better
The Meaning of every relationship starts from getting to know each other better. If you haven’t introduced yourself to your team, book that meeting now. As a new EM, it’s a no-brainer to start with introducing yourself. But if you have been EMing your team for years, you might ask “why should I express myself? - My teammates know me better”. Is that the case? - Do they know the values that you believe in? Do they know how you make decisions? Do they know how you share feedback? How technical are you? - it’s always good to talk about it.
On the other hand, get to know them better. What are their challenges and where do they need help? How do they want to receive and share feedback? Do they prefer autonomy over hand holding? What are the personal priorities in their life?
1-1 meetings are a great opportunity to build that trust and spend time getting to know each other. Need fancy options? - Go for lunch together. It’s a great way to start building relationships from food. You just can’t go wrong.
Be vulnerable and empathetic
We, managers, are the most uncertain and vulnerable creatures in the world. Don’t take me wrong. It’s not that you’re uncertain as a person but uncertain in a way how your job is defined and the work that you do. Your job is not to write a program that gives certain output but to see growth in your people that takes time, define efficient processes and pray that it will work in every circumstance, commit to deliver projects even though you and your team never had that time to estimate every piece and foresee challenges that could come.
To make it even more challenging, there are no clear signals to detect your uncertainty unless you come out and express yourself. Unlike technical systems that your engineers work with, as it can show at least the state whenever it’s unstable and uncertain. Unlike dashboards to show improvements in north star metrics that your product managers refer to, to make data driven decisions.
First person to come out and show uncertainty in our teams is us, engineering managers. We have to show uncertainty in decisions we made, commitment we had with our stakeholders and scope and depth of technicality that we don’t get to work with everyday like our engineers do.
Be transparent
Being transparent to your team and stakeholders in whatever you do will let them trust you. Let it be on prioritization, project statuses, feedback, performance reviews and how you make decisions. Your team will appreciate your intention and attitude towards transparency and for letting them understand your thought process.
Here are some actions you can do to be more transparent:
Regularly share updates on the status of ongoing projects, including successes, challenges, and any changes in timelines. Be open about the project's progress, and if there are delays, provide the reasons behind them.
When making significant decisions that affect the team, communicate the rationale behind the decision-making process. Share relevant information and factors considered, ensuring that the team understands the context.
Acknowledge your own mistakes and failures when they occur. Discuss what went wrong, why it happened, and what steps are being taken to rectify the situation. This openness fosters a culture of accountability.
Be their ally
Have you rubber ducked with your engineers in difficult situations or paired with them to resolve any technical challenge? - I did it a few times.
There was one rubber ducking session that stood out. After 15 minutes of discussion, we resolved it and I was thanked. Trust gained. Mission accomplished. But I didn’t say to you what I did on this occasion and how we resolved it. I did.. I did “nothing”. Yes - I was just listening to the engineer, said “mmm” twice, “uhmm” thrice, the engineer found the root cause of the problem, summarized it to me and resolved it themself.
Moral of the story? - Be their ally whenever you get a chance. Helping them to resolve their technical challenge with your expertise or just listening to them even though you have nothing to say will gain their trust.
Let them do
Trust is reciprocal. If you don’t trust engineers in your team to do the job, they can’t trust you as a manager. Doing their job yourself to finish a project on time or playing the middleman in communication with others or you approving their work every time will not let them learn and grow. Instead, you should let them do it and act autonomously but give them constructive feedback on a regular basis and guide them on how to do it efficiently. If you see a gap in their ability, better suggest them learning resources or give space to learn from mistakes.
Be open about ways of working together right from the start and ask them what’s the ideal time to have the alignment regarding the work and insist them to reach out to you proactively instead of you reaching out to them every time to check on the progress. Once these boundaries are defined, it will be easy to work and trust each other.
Praise in public; criticize in private
Should you criticize in private or public? - First let’s understand what criticism is and the need for it.
Whenever I hear the word criticism, “movie critics” come to my mind. I love to binge watch a lot of movie critics as they analyze the acting, plot, writing, storyline and share their perspective in detail. Most interesting aspect here is, critics are shared to the public and not necessarily to the movie makers directly.
Can we apply the principle of movie critique to criticize individuals in your team in public setup? Will it be effective and most importantly will it serve the purpose? - Sadly not. Criticism in teams is the opposite to that of movie critics. It should reach the individual first before reaching the wider audience. Sometimes it doesn’t have to reach wide unless it can be resolved by everyone together or it’s a team problem rather than an individual’s.
Criticizing in private shows that you care about the individual’s opinion and focus is to listen to their perspective and find a solution rather than placing blame. In 1-1 setup, they will not feel defensive and may openly come forward for suggestions if the criticism is valid and sensible. Wrapping criticism with constructive feedback is more powerful and can earn their trust for being mindful.
You want to praise someone in public? - absolutely, go ahead. There’s no better way of recognizing their efforts and contribution and they will absolutely love it.
Be Invested
Be invested in your people’s goals and success, professional relationships that you have with them and through the commitment that you show in everything you do. And it has to be a long term investment.
Return of your investment? - Trust and commitment you gain for being invested in them.
When trust breaks?
Breaking trust is relatively easier than building. What does it take to bring down a stack of cups that you built over time? - a slight fumble, boom! The entire cup collapses. It takes literally seconds. Same goes with trust.
And if you’re an engineering manager, it's a lot easier. There are many ways to break trust and here are the most frequent ones:
Tell X, Do Y: Being inconsistent with what you say and what you do.
Over promise and Under deliver: Making commitments exceeding what you can realistically deliver and failing to meet those expectations.
Not talking about mistakes and avoiding ownership: Not talking about mistakes and failures at all and avoid taking ownership for the results.
Team < Self: Focusing on your own goals, needs and perspectives as an engineering manager and not caring about the team and others.
Micromanagement: Involved in every tiny detail and taking decisions on behalf of others. What does it ultimately mean? - yes, less room for autonomy.
Tell X, Do Y
Tell X, Do Y is when you say a thing and do something else. As an engineering manager, you’re expected to keep your integrity high in what you say and commit. When your actions contradict your words, you create a bad reputation for yourself and also for your team with external stakeholders.
Quality vs Speed is always a debatable topic in engineering and I love it. Telling your team to focus on quality but constantly pushing them to deliver on time by compromising quality is a classic case of Tell X Do Y. And moreover it leaves your team in splits when you tell the same thing again next time, “Ahoy! Let's focus on quality this quarter as it’s important for us to refactor our system for better maintainability”. They know what’s coming up - another compromise on the cards. Your team will lose trust and motivation on your words and may not engage in discussions if you tell one and do something else.
Over promise and Under deliver
This is quite a common case where managers being ambitious and committing for unrealistic promises with projects but end up under delivering in terms of expectation, quality and timeliness. This will lead to dissatisfaction from stakeholders and a loss of trust in your ability to accurately estimate and deliver on commitments.
Next on the list where managers make a lot of promises is on the promotions to their direct reports. I enthusiastically promised a couple of times when I started as a manager on seeing an individual’s good performance within my team, without understanding nuances of promotion and other dynamics that comes along with it. At the end of the promotion discussion, it was decided that the individual in my team will not be promoted due to factors such as limited available positions, superior performance from individuals in other teams, and not meeting the success criteria for the next level. What was the result? A diminishing trust in me as a manager due to my well-intentioned yet overzealous promises.
Not talking about mistakes and avoiding ownership
After you make a mistake and walk away by avoiding ownership, your reliability will be questioned and trust goes down. There are ‘n’ number of opportunities to make mistakes. And for engineering managers, it’s n+1. As you’re helming the leadership role of your team, you have to make decisions swiftly. It’s easy to go wrong anytime. Not owning your decision and consequences that come along with it, will damage your reputation and the trust factor.
Team < Self
When you become a manager, it’s not about you. It’s about them - the team. Downplaying your team and showing that you're more important as an individual than them is a high degree of self-orientation which leads to lack of trust in you.
What’s the highest degree of self-orientation? Passing blame when things didn’t work as expected. When you represent your team to senior leadership and point finger outwards for any mistakes that happened and point finger inwards for all the success that your team has achieved is a sign of rating yourself higher than the team. It not only impacts your trust factor within your team but also outside of your team.
Micromanagement
Term “Micromanagement” was prevalent from the 70s and it’s still a revelation as we speak. Being the bothersome boss who second guesses every decision your direct report makes, frets about the font size on the UI, or inspects all of your engineers’ pull requests not only frustrates but seriously damages the motivation and morale of the individual.
Every manager out there has micromanaged at least once in their career - it may be during crises in their teams, not relying on an individual's ability or some assumed that’s their only style of management and micromanage all the way. It’s a clear sign of lack of trust in their teammates. And as we know, trust is a reciprocal effect. If we don’t trust others, we don’t deserve to be trusted.
We should be mindful of drawing healthy boundaries with our teammates and define the right balance according to the individual needs and preferences on the ways of working.
Rebuilding
When a trust is broken, what follows up after matters a lot.
Acknowledge: First and foremost is to acknowledge specific action or incident that broke the trust by presenting yourself and owning the consequence.
Intent: Showing intent to address lost trust and look to rebuild it. Engage in discussions, planning course corrections and showing it in action.
Commitment, consistency and open communication: Work on realistic commitment, exhibit consistent behavior and performance, be transparent and timely communicate about updates.
Ask for feedback: Ask for regular feedback on how things have improved from the time when the trust was broken.
Regain trust: This is the moment where you start to feel the trust has been regained. You look to continue the momentum and learn from the past experience.
The more consistent you exhibit behavior and show intent for rebuilding trust whenever it is broken, the more reliable you’ll be regarded among the people that you work with.
That’s all for now - What trust means for you? Share your thoughts.
Thank you for this article; I am a brand new EM, and I've found a lot of insights in it.