Earning trust with an inherited team

The other day, one of my team members asked me how you earn the trust of a team you inherit as compared to a team you've hired yourself. Certainly hiring someone starts you off at a higher baseline, and depending on the situation your new team may or may not be inclined to trust a new leader. However, the methods for earning trust are the same, and the job of building and maintaining the trust of your team members is never done regardless of how the team came together.

(If you're walking into your first management role in tech, I'd encourage you to start here for my more general thoughts on the challenges you'll face.)

I'm intentionally reinforcing the word earn here. Trust in a leader is not a given, and although in some cases it can be spent like currency, it's a lot easier to lose than to gain.

I'm also not going to get deep into why it's so important for your team to trust you, even though I suspect there are a few leaders who don't think it's important or don't care – that the only thing that matters is they do what you want, whether motivated by trust, fear, ambition, or any other emotion on the carrot-to-stick continuum. Maybe I'll get into this topic another time, but for now I'll just say that I think it's absolutely critical to a high-performing team, at least for the way I lead.

There are two main differences in context that affect how to earn the trust of an inherited team. First, the context of the team before you came on board necessarily affects your baseline with the team. Second, the team knows more than you about their work. A lot more.

The only way you'll be able to respond to the context of the team before you joined is to understand that context, which is easier said than done. If you're lucky, the former leader is leaving on good terms and is willing to meet with you to share their perspective. This will of course only provide part of the picture anyway. The paradox here is that your new team isn't going to tell you all of their hopes and fears until they trust you, but you need to know what they're thinking to most efficiently earn their trust. They may have loved their previous leader and resent their replacement, or they may have been stung by bad leadership and/or rapid changes in direction. One or more of them may resent you because they felt they were next in line for the role. Thankfully the second difference in context might give you a way to demonstrate your trustworthiness early in your tenure and help you learn what you're walking into.

When you're new to a role but the rest of the team isn't, there's a temporary inversion in knowledge and power that could be uncomfortable – and they are most likely aware of it too. If you come in and tell them they've been doing everything wrong and act like you know more about their work, you're going to confirm all their worst fears about their new leader and they will (rightfully) treat you like the enemy. Come in with humility and respect and ask them what they think should be different and they're a lot more likely to tell you. That's not job done, though, you still have to follow through on their asks and be clear about what you can and can't help with.

This approach to earning the team's trust through seeking their input on what they need from you is something you should continue throughout your journey with that team. You should also continue to value their input on the technical direction they feel is right for whatever products or services the team is responsible for, since they have been in the details far longer than you have. These, and other good leadership behaviors, apply whether you've inherited the team or built it yourself.

There's one more quirk here in that an inherited team might not be full of the exact traits that you look for (see here for a reminder of what I look for) when you are hiring, but part of your job is to be flexible and work with what you have. If you feel like you can only work with specific types of people and are inclined to clean house and replace everyone with your own hires, I would suggest you instead come in with openness and curiosity. There's something you can learn from every person you work with, and you're not going to grow as quickly as you could if you don't surround yourself with people who challenge your expectations, intentionally or not. You're also not establishing an atmosphere of trust and safety if you get rid of everyone who doesn't fit your mold of the ideal employee. You might even learn about other traits you hadn't previously considered valuable that you will then look out for in the future.

Probably more to come in a future post about earning your team's trust, but the punchline here is that the same strategies work for gaining the trust of team members you hired and those you inherited. Recognizing you're starting from a different baseline will help you get there faster, but these differences tend to smooth out quickly when things go well.

When things don't go well ... that's partially the inspiration for my next post.