Your career success is limited by your ability to build trust.
The pursuit of career success is not an individual game. At every stage, you are dependent on a host of people for help with performing what you are hired to do, and growing in your career.
Of course, it is not all one way - you contribute to the success of others as well. It would therefore not be wrong to say winning at your career is a team sport.
This interdependence with others is captured in the second of the 3 Drivers of Career Success - Partnerships (the other two are Performance and Perception). Your partnerships encompass a wide variety of people - beginning with those who are closest to you and directly involved in the work you do (Core Relationships), your Networks - comprising of people you personally know who are not involved or less directly involved in your day to day work, and your Communities : people you have some shared affiliation with, but may or may not know personally. Relationships, networks, and communities - all have a significant role to play in your career success.
When people and relationships are involved, trust automatically enters the picture. You cannot influence, collaborate with, or get support from people unless they trust you. You cannot work effectively or productively with a team when there is no trust. And if you are a leader, trust is one of the basic needs your followers expect.
Which makes building trust, fast and effectively, an important skill you need to develop, if you wish to get ahead in your career.
So how do you build trust?
One approach is to look at the values that people associate with being trustworthy. These include - honesty, integrity, and authenticity. And the way to show people that you are honest, authentic and a person of integrity - is to demonstrate these values in all your interactions. Needless to say, you cannot consistently display these values unless you truly embrace them - faking honesty, integrity, and authenticity won’t get you far - and will erode any trust you have already built.
Another way of looking at what constitutes trust was neatly captured by David Maister in his Trust Equation. According to this equation:
Trust = (Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy) divided by (Self Orientation)
Credibility is about credentials, experience, competence and other qualities that make you someone people can believe.
Reliability is about whether you can be counted upon to do what you say or commit
Intimacy is about shared emotional experiences that help you connect with people more deeply
Self Orientation is the extent to which you are perceived to be acting in your own interest ) as against being concerned about the other person or acting for shared benefit). Note that self-orientation is in the denominator, which means the less self-oriented you come across, the higher the level of trust.
While the Trust Equation appears to tie it all up neatly, and suggests that trust is built through favourable assessments of others across a number of interactions, adopting a transactional approach to building trust is ineffective.
To effectively and rapidly build trust, you have to internalise the values, and make trust producing behaviours a habit - so that the conditions are right for trust to emerge naturally.
In other words, to build trust with people, you have to make yourself trustworthy.