How to Build Trust at Work and Gain the Influence You Deserve

Most people don't realize that trust can be built deliberately.

Whether you're building new relationships during a career transition or rebuilding a relationship that has broken down, trust shapes whether someone will listen to you, recognize your contribution, or advocate for your next step.

In recent posts, I've focused on making your experience understood through connection and story-showing. Trust is the next part of that conversation: what helps someone move from understanding your experience to relying on your judgment?

We have enough behavioral science to understand many of the actions that help people earn it. Yet we often talk about trust as if it should follow automatically from our expertise, intentions, or title.

“You need to trust me.”

Trust is earned through trustworthy behavior. But often my clients are trying to build understanding with someone who is making trust mistakes: a manager who bypasses them, a decision-maker who assumes their motives, or a colleague who dismisses their concerns.

MASTER-D helps us examine those trust gaps and decide how to work with the person while maintaining our own integrity. These mindshifts help you recognize what is happening in a relationship, as well as consider your own response. You can influence a conversation; you cannot do the other person's part for them.

Involve people before a decision affects them

If your decision will affect someone, talk with them before you make it, while their perspective can still inform the outcome.

When you skip that step, you do what I call a bypass. You may believe you made a sensible decision. They may experience exclusion, disrespect, or a loss of control. A bypass can damage trust even when your intentions were good.

Imagine you've been working toward a larger role in clinical operations. Your manager changes a workflow you own, announcing the decision to the whole team before speaking with you. The plan looks efficient on paper, but it adds work and overlooks constraints you could have explained.

Your manager may see a process improvement. You experience a decision about your work that you had no opportunity to influence. Recognizing the bypass helps you name the gap precisely, instead of being left with a general sense that you are not valued.

That is an illustrative situation, but the distinction is familiar: telling someone afterward gives them information; involving them beforehand gives their perspective a place in the decision. It does not give everyone a veto. It does require taking the people affected seriously.

When you've been bypassed: This can explain why you no longer trust someone to include you: you have reason to worry they will do it again. They may not recognize the bypass or its impact on trust. Consider whether simply asking them to speak with you before making a decision that affects you could help. Make clear that you mean while your input can still matter. Their response—and whether they follow through next time—helps you judge what you can rely on.

The current AI transition makes this especially relevant. In its September 7 leadership briefing on trust, McKinsey emphasizes candor about uncertainty and how decisions will happen, alongside conversations with employees and investment in their capabilities. My application is straightforward: people need to understand their place in a change while there is still a meaningful conversation to have.

Question your certainty about someone else's mind

Don't assume you know better than another person what they are thinking or feeling. You don't have direct access to their experience.

You may feel certain you know why they made a comment or what their reaction means. That certainty deserves examination.

This applies equally when someone assumes they know your intentions. A manager's interpretation of your ambition is not the same as your ambition. Your task is to make your experience and reasoning understandable, while resisting the temptation to become equally certain about theirs.

When I delivered 360-degree feedback to senior managers at EY, I saw how confidently people attributed comments to particular colleagues. In the conversations I recall, those attributions were completely wrong.

That experience stayed with me. These were capable people who knew their workplaces. Their confidence still did not make their interpretation accurate.

We each carry a movie of our lives in our minds. Past experiences, emotions, and conclusions formed long ago can shape what we notice and what meaning we give it. The other person has an entirely different movie. Neither of us has an unfiltered view.

The Cognitive Bias Codex featured by Visual Capitalist maps 188 named biases. Treat that as a reminder of the many ways interpretation can go astray, rather than a definitive count of everything operating in a particular person's mind.

One especially relevant pattern is naive realism: experiencing our own perspective as objective reality. When someone disagrees, we may conclude that they are uninformed, incapable of understanding, or acting in bad faith. In their paper on personal narratives and trust, David Hagmann, Julia Minson, and Catherine Tinsley describe this pattern, drawing on Ross and Ward's research.

Before acting on that first impulse, ask: What did I actually observe, and what have I supplied as the explanation?

That question creates room to learn something your first reaction may have missed.

When someone assumes they know your mind: You can identify the interpretation that doesn't fit and explain your actual intention or experience. Ask whether they are willing to reconsider their conclusion. You can offer clarity without accepting someone else's account of what you think or feel as more valid than your own.

Respect feelings you don't share

You can empathize with another person's feelings without feeling the same way or agreeing with every interpretation.

Return to the workflow example. You may understand your manager's pressure to deliver results while still recognizing that excluding you damaged the working relationship. Understanding their pressure does not require agreeing with their decision or minimizing its impact on you.

That distinction matters when advancement depends on working with someone whose behavior has disappointed you. Empathy leaves room for a clear account of what happened and what you need.

In my work, I use the 3 Worlds of Perspective: first-person experience, the other person's second-person perspective, and the larger third-person reality around both of you. The work is moving among those views, while checking what you think you understand.

The team's operational requirements matter. So do the colleague's concerns and the leader's rationale. You need enough perspective to consider all of them without treating your own view as the whole story.

That same discipline applies in an interview. A hiring manager's skeptical question may reflect a risk they need to understand. Asking about the concern gives you more to work with than silently deciding they don't appreciate your expertise. I explore this further in using mentalization to understand your audience in interviews and managing up.

When your feelings are dismissed: Make the distinction explicit: you are asking them to understand the impact on you, not to feel the same way. You can acknowledge their perspective and still ask them to take yours seriously. Notice whether they make room for your experience or continue to explain it away.

Help people understand through precise story-showing

Your intentions are internal. Other people experience whether you kept a commitment, acknowledged a mistake, or made room for their perspective.

They may also reach conclusions about you without considering what you knew, what you were trying to achieve, or which constraints you faced. Mentalization means considering the thoughts, feelings, and intentions behind behavior. In practical coaching terms, the challenge is often helping someone make room for that perspective.

This is also the practical argument in strategy+business's article on consistency and employee trust: stated values need to match the behavior people encounter. The article dates to 2021, but that distinction remains useful.

This is why I emphasize well-told, precise story-showing in interviews and advancement conversations. Let the other person see what was happening, why it mattered, and how you responded. Specific details give them something to consider beyond their first impression. Evidence gives them a way to assess the result. Your subsequent behavior shows whether they can continue to rely on you.

Research offers a useful connection here. Across five preregistered experiments about ideological disagreement, Hagmann and colleagues found that people using personal experience to support their views were perceived as more trustworthy than those using data alone or third-party stories. Adding data to personal narratives did not undermine the trust benefit. The study also found that preferences differed when a task emphasized cognitive ability rather than trust. Read the paper.

My application to career conversations is straightforward: give someone a precise, truthful experience through which they can understand your judgment. A list of achievements can leave them guessing about the person behind the results. Story-showing makes your decisions, constraints, and contribution visible.

That is why story-showing belongs in a conversation about influence: it makes the grounds for trust visible. It cannot make an unkept promise disappear.

When your contribution is misunderstood: Choose one specific experience that makes your decisions and contribution visible. Connect it to the concern the other person has actually expressed, and check what they understood. If their own assurances repeatedly fail to match their actions, keep that pattern in view. A clearer story can support understanding; rebuilding trust also requires their follow-through.

How MASTER-D turns these shifts into practice

These mindshifts sit at the heart of my MASTER-D framework, which translates behavioral science into practical actions for building and repairing professional trust.

With clients, that often means examining where another person's behavior is weakening trust and choosing a response that preserves the client's integrity. We work from observable behavior and test our interpretations. The framework helps organize that analysis; it does not give us access to someone else's mind.

I've used it for more than 15 years. In my experience, it works when you work it.

Knowing a principle and applying it under pressure are different skills. The deeper work is recognizing which behavior a particular relationship needs, then carrying it through a real conversation and the actions that follow.

Building trust in a new relationship and repairing a specific break also require different attention. If someone has already experienced a bypass or a broken commitment, a more polished explanation alone will not resolve it. The impact needs acknowledgment, and the next behavior needs to change.

For now, consider one relationship that matters to your next career step. Where is understanding breaking down? What specific experience could help the other person see what they are missing?

That is a useful place to begin making your expertise easier to recognize and your judgment easier to rely on.

If you're navigating a career transition, seeking advancement, or trying to rebuild a strained professional relationship, work with me on the situation you are facing. We can examine the trust gaps and practice communicating your value without compromising your integrity.