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Credibility: The Key to Quickly and Effectively Building Trust with your Client and Teams

Bridge over smooth water

Building trust bridges relationship gaps. Here’s how to do it.

Have you ever had a difficult encounter with a client and then found it hard to reach out to them? Have you ever been in a client situation where your trust has eroded? How about with a coworker? Don’t be afraid to admit if you have, because it’s a normal part of life and can happen quite frequently. One of the many challenges we have with professional and social engagements is building and keeping trust. I call this the “trust factor”.

The Trust Factor

The trust factor is strengthened by many different behaviors: Following through on commitments, walking the walk, being true to yourself, evoking transparency, and maintaining accountability. Time, of course, is also a crucial influence on the trust factor. The time it takes to build trust with any one person can take days, weeks, or even years. But in business, we all know that we must make effective use of our time to build trust as quickly as possible.

Trust Factor

Building trust takes time and requires focus on doing what you say you’re going to do.


In order to successfully and effectively build trust in your professional relationships, you’ll need the help of your peers, team, and clients. Once this is accomplished, a cohesive bond can be formed between teams, which will ultimately foster productivity and results. In order to have trust, one must establish a strong sense of credibility. This can be achieved by:

  1. Establishing clarity around roles and responsibilities which builds a foundation that supports credibility
  2. Reinforcing credibility by holding yourself and your team accountable
  3. Sustaining credibility by working together to make and honor commitments

Step 1: Build a Foundation that Supports Credibility

Establishing Clarity around Roles and Responsibilities

 

Think of it this way: You want your house to have solid foundation when it’s built, right? It serves as your house’s main support. The same theory applies to your trust factor. A poor or weak foundation to your house results in costly, ongoing problems. Having poor credibility and lack of role clarity supporting your trust factor, well, you can imagine.

The first step in establishing a foundation for your trust factor is to clarify team roles and responsibilities. To do this, your team has to be able to answer the question: “What is my purpose on this team?” Their answers to this question will gauge your team’s understanding around their roles and give them an opportunity to establish their credibility. Everyone’s trust factor will be firmly supported once credibility has been established.

Many organizations have a lack of clarity around roles and accountabilities. This becomes a caveat to project collaboration, credibility, and success. The slightest miscommunication or misunderstanding can damage an entire team’s credibility and momentum. Without a clear vision of established roles, a team will scramble when a new idea or problem presents itself. In addition to creating an atmosphere of uncertainty and a lack of predictability and credibility, missed opportunities, rework and delays will surely emerge.

Trust Factor and Knowing Your Role

Know your role and you will better know the expectations others have of you.

Step 2:  Reinforce Newly Enforced Credibility

Hold Yourself and Your Team Accountable to Meet Client Expectations

The first thing you need to do here is eliminate mediocrity. It is our responsibility to call people out for under-performing and encourage improvement. Imagine the implications to a team when more than one person is picking up extra slack. Feels counterproductive, stressful, and hurts the team’s morale, doesn’t it? By being accountable, tasks will not fall through the cracks. As a result, your progress will remain strong. If you see an area in need of improvement, be vocal about it. Be true to yourself and your peers (Read: being at face value) while maintaining a high level of transparency. This  will reinforce a sense of trust within your environment. Accountability greatly evolves your trust factor and will take it to the next level.

Trust Factor, Knowing Your Role and Accountability

Hold accountable both yourself and those around you.

Step 3:  Sustain Credibility

Working Together to Make and Honor Commitments

Finally, work together with your peers and clients. Keep metrics that add value and make sure that everyone understands the purpose, goals and format of the metrics. This will add visibility on what each member of the team has committed to accomplish and will stimulate accountability. It is at this moment that trust is mutual with you and your client or peers. Throughout the project, the synergy  created from mutual trust will make your team run on all cylinders.

Teams that work together to build trust are more likely to succeed at it.

 

Be transparent with your team to maintain credibility. By following through on your commitments, you will continue to grow trust with those around you. Sustaining a mutual trust between your client and peers will remove crippling roadblocks, allow you and your peers to see goals clearly, and induce a high performance environment.

Get Started. Build Trust Today.

Can trust be achieved in a short amount of time? If mistrust exists, can it be eradicated? This, of course, is the million dollar question. By simply treating your team as your true teammates and allowing a more fluid, open channel of communication, trust will begin to develop and results can easily be obtained.  Work on obtaining clarity and agreement from everyone at the beginning and watch your team go into overdrive. Amazing things happen when everyone is on the same page, working toward the same goal, and sharing a dedication for excellence.

Do you always hold your team mates accountable? Can you think of a time when you could have been more transparent with your client or team?

October 12, 2010 | 2 comments | View Post

How Internal Pressures Can Implode an IT Organization

Roadmap with cities and distances

Know where you are today. Be clear on where you’re going.

Last week, I talked about some of the many organizational pressures that can implode an IT team.  In fact, some of these may apply to other parts of the organization as well.  This week, I’ll take a look at an approach that can shed light onto solving these issues.

It’s All About Perspective

The ability to look inward in a truthful, non-self-serving manner is a phenomenal attribute to possess.  The same holds true when looking at an organization that you’ve helped create.  Allowing myself to pull out from working within the team to working on the team has afforded me valuable insights.  This ability to change perspectives is the best way to look around and objectively survey the landscape.

Once I change my perspective, the focus becomes applying a very simple approach that has been invaluable to me over the years.  Three steps: Where do we want to be, where are we now, and how do we get there?  In that order.

Where Do We Want To Be?

What may have worked well a few years ago may not be the optimal solution for today.  This is simply because our surroundings continually change.  So, resetting the baseline and re-establishing alignment can be a continual process.  Understanding how the organization will be measured and knowing what problems you’re trying to solve today will be the starting point to crafting your solution.  Not knowing where you want to be is like driving a car with a blindfold.  You’re bound to hit something and you won’t get anywhere.

Getting the right group involved is a great way to start the alignment process.  During that process, it may become clear that others have different agendas, goals and ideas on how something should be implemented.  Facilitating this group alignment on where the organization needs to be and establishing a common vision will allow everyone to head in the same direction.

This is also the time to make sure your goals will solve the problems as they are perceived today.  If silos exist or technology is scattered as I described last week, then perhaps one of the goals is to look at how to create horizontal technologies that can be shared amongst the silos.  The goal could be as simple as creating a shared platform which has an added benefit of getting the teams communicating more.

Where Are We Now?

This is where taking a step back is the most helpful.  Being immersed in something for an extended period of time gives us a single perspective of what we know to be true.  Because many teams have a lot of knowledge about what already exists (after all, they live it every day) it can be tempting to breeze through this phase.  Do not breeze.  Do.  Optimally, document the enterprise architecture of the technologies, processes and roles that exist.  You will most certainly uncover some interesting aspects of your surroundings that were previously based on assumptions.  If you have found this to be true in your experiences, please share in this blog discussion!

How Do We Get There?

This is the part where a roadmap is created.  This is typically the most difficult phase.  It has been equated to creating a solution to changing the tires on a moving race car.  It can be difficult, but do-able.

Not only is this the most challenging phase, but it’s also my favorite.  This is also the same phase where you should consider inviting the solutioning team from the first phase. They are invested in the destination, so it only makes sense that they should have some passion and energy around getting everyone else there.  Don’t go it alone.  Following this approach, you will begin seeing a team start to craft a common vision and a plan that is designed to accomplish what may have previously been thought as impossible.

The Bottom Line

Continually measuring and re-aligning has helped me immensely in preventing my teams from imploding.  This is not a tool that gets used once and discarded.  It’s designed to be used continually.  The frequency will be determined by the velocity of change in your organization.

Discussion

  • How have you had to cope with organizational pressures and how did you get started toward resolution?
  • How did you engage the right people for the solutioning phases?
  • What obstacles did you overcome?
  • What other pressures have you seen implode or hurt an organization?

Photo Credit: Goldemberg Fonseca

October 5, 2010 | 0 comments | View Post

How Internal Pressures Can Implode an IT Organization

Implosion1Last week, I talked about some of the organizational mindsets that lead to misalignment within an IT team. This week, I’ll look more closely at some of the specific pressures that can cause problems for the team and impact IT team performance. These are based on some of my own experiences in my role as an Architect.

Team Silos and Lack of Communication

Larger IT organizations often contain splintered groups that focus on either specific functional or technological areas. These groups can easily become silos. This can result in redundant efforts and solutions, dissimilar technologies, or disjointed entry points for business requests. More importantly, these silos may not easily communicate, inhibiting collaboration. Probable result: If a technology group makes changes and deploys, they run the risk of clobbering another team’s systems. Usually, they won’t know about it until production issues arise. The teams are neither in alignment on technology, people or process. This has the potential to bring progress within the IT organization to a standstill.

Pressure to be Bleeding Edge

Have you ever witnessed a technology team adopting new technologies for the sake of being bleeding edge? This desire to be bleeding edge is another factor that can cause pressure on the IT team. There are certainly many cases where new technology solves problems and creates additional efficiency. But what about the team that wants to utilize a new technology only for the sake of playing with new technology? It may perform the same function as the current technology, but just does it in a different way. Is there any value in that?  Does it help attract talent? Can it be adopted and integrated without any additional effort? Does it position the team to becoming more nimble? Does it align with long-term objectives of not only IT but the organization as a whole?

If some members of the team answer “yes” to these questions and some answer “no”, then the use of some new technologies can cause misalignment on the IT Team.  They may either have conflicting agendas or may just be out of alignment with how they need to accomplish the task-at-hand.

Teams That are Always Stretched

Stretching from time-to-time can be very healthy. It keeps a team aware of their limits and capabilities. It also helps a team to gel and rally around an effort that has a sense of urgency. Then, during the non-stretch times, it allows the team to think strategically, place more focus on refactoring which will allow it to scale for the next stretch. On the flip side of that, a team that is never stretched can have morale issues and may not deliver value at the velocity that is expected. But while the resulting atrophy isn’t healthy, teams that are always stretched are in worse condition. Stretching can result from task overload, following an antiquated process, working with unfamiliar technologies and working toward an unrealistic goal.

In any of the situations above, design and development decisions are usually made with the highest priority being: “Get this pain away from me as quickly as possible”. Decisions consistently made in this mode, usually create technical debt. If an IT organization consistently resorts to short term fixes, it compromises its potential and future progress and we begin to see implosion at the organizational level — not a sustainable plan.

What are some of the pressures has your IT team faced recently?

Next…

Next week, I will delve into some of the approaches that can be used to rectify these situations or prevent them from happening in the first place.

September 28, 2010 | 0 comments | View Post

100 Missed Learning Opportunities a Day: Trim the Fat from “Knowledge Management.”

fireflies-in-jar-smOn teams of all sizes many lessons are learned each day, some big, some small. An “I-wouldn’t-do-that-again” happens here, or a “who-knew-it-would-be-so-easy-if-done-that-way” happens there.

These little lessons are fleeting and likely often go unnoticed even by those experiencing them. Like fireflies, they flash and they’re gone. When and where another insight will flash next is anyone’s guess.

The Benefits of Shared Wisdom

Many of the the “whys” of capturing and sharing lessons learned are obvious:

  • Leverage the expertise of people across the organization
  • Facilitate and organize the innovation and organizational learning process
      Help solve huge problems
  • Manage intellectual capital that may otherwise sit (and stay) in key individuals

Think of the most useful tool or method you’ve discovered for getting yourself organized. Now, realize that everyone else on your team has learned something similar, or better, or even synergistic making the value of your combined ideas a huge intellectual asset for the entire organization.

If teams could get to the point where identifying and sharing these bits of value became second nature, and it could be done at little or no cost, wouldn’t it be worth a try?

You know when you find it
In your darkest hour, you strike gold
A thought clicks, not the be-all end-all
Just another lesson learned…
— Alice in Chains, “Lesson Learned”

Why Capturing and Sharing Seems so Hard (And How to Overcome The Barriers)

Over the years I’ve been to many Project Retrospectives. Some resulted in useful information leveraged in future endeavors while others resulted in nothing but bellies full of pizza. So what makes some of our efforts stick and others not?

Sabotage.

The way we think (or not think) about lessons learned often keeps us from identifying, sharing and leveraging them. To better understand how to get to the point where sharing ideas becomes natural, let’s look at some typical mindsets about knowledge sharing and what we can do to change them:

1. “I haven’t really learned anything here.”

Obstacle #1 in capturing and sharing a lesson learned is not seeing the lesson in the first place. If we wait for light bulbs to shine and sirens to wail, we’ll continue to hum along in our own worlds and keep all the good stuff to ourselves.

How can we start seeing the small stuff? Try this exercise. Keep a notepad next to you (dedicated to this task) for a couple days and take notes:

  • If you’ve been stuck and suddenly are making progress, think for a moment what got you rolling.
  • If you’ve had anxiety and suddenly feel relief, note what allowed for your change in state.
  • If you’re feeling particularly excited, motivated or happy about your work, note what it is you’re doing and think how you can bring that perspective to other areas of your work.

2. “My lessons learned aren’t new or unique.”

Individuals often neglect the unique perspective they bring to their work and therefore the inherent value in their particular learning process. The path down which we travel toward discovery can be as enlightening to others as the discovery itself.

  • Think about what you do outside of work that engages, excites, and motivates you (eg. fishing, tennis, video games). Now, think about how those activities influence the work you do. Write that down. Share it with someone.
  • Don’t censor. Write down all your lessons learned, your insights, your ideas. Others are likely to find value in more of those insights than you think.

3. “No one really cares about or has time for these.”

Most people enjoy learning and sharing what they know. But when teams assemble to do important work, people get busy. If a task isn’t considered critical to the activity at hand, that task is very unlikely to get any “CPU cycles” dedicated to it.

  • Get everyone on your team to do these exercises for three days. At the end of those three days, share the results with each other.
  • Do it again.
  • Then, work together to identify a means by which you can make this a part of your routine. Put it on the weekly meeting agenda, or make it part of your Daily Stand-Up Meeting.

4. “Why bother?”

We’ve all seen great initiatives kicked off with great intentions and high energy. However, without the right leadership, tools or motivation, the initial fire that burns strong and fast will soon fade to a hint of smoke that reminds us of its one time existence.

A vision for growth, development, and learning at an individual, team and organizational level is important, but it requires support and nurturing.

  • As leaders, encourage your teams to do these exercises. Take part in them as well. Repeat.
  • Share the results of these exercises with those around you, and ask other teams do the same.
  • Identify tools that may make this easier. They them. If a tool isn’t easy or can’t be incorporated into your routine, discard the tool and try another.

5. “I learned something, but at the result of screwing up. I’m not sharing this!”

Lessons learned are often born out of mistakes. It takes a very safe environment not only to share the lesson learned, but to bring to light a mistake large or small that may otherwise go unnoticed.

  • As a leader, create the safest environment possible. View mistakes as investments in education. Encourage the sharing.
  • As a team, aggressively identify obstacles. These obstacles are a safe context in which others can offer prior stumbles and associated lessons learned.

Making it Happen

Understanding this wisdom management as a two-step process can keep it simple for you to get off the starting block. The two steps are to Produce (identify and share) lessons learned and Consume (leverage) lessons learned.

In order to successfully Produce, there are two ingredients:

  1. Immediacy – Get in the habit of identifying lessons learned and make it easy to capture them as they happen.
  2. Motivation – Make it part of the routine and an expectation of each other.

In order for Consumption to occur, the two ingredients are:

  1. Visibility – Find a highly trafficked place online or off-line to collect the lessons learned.
  2. Relevancy – Group them, highlight them, revisit them regularly, identify where they have relevance to the work you’re doing today.

I hope this gives you a handful of ideas to get started on leveraging collective wisdom – ideas that don’t require an expensive knowledge management tool.

Photo Credit: Bryan Rosengrant

What practices do you employ on your team to identify and share lessons learned?

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August 17, 2010 | 0 comments | View Post
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