Build Trust

Trust is an important foundation for working well with your manager. If you can’t trust each other, your relationship with your manager will break down and your job will be more difficult than it needs to be.

If your manager can’t trust you can do the job they ask you to do, you’ll miss out on projects and opportunities to grow and be promoted. If they can’t trust you’ll communicate openly and honestly about the status of a project, they’ll have no choice but to micromanage you to get the information they need.

So, how do you build trust with your boss?

The first step may be obvious, but it needs to be said—do your job. There’s no way around this. It’s table stakes for everything else discussed in this section. If you don’t do your job, you’re going to have a very difficult time building trust with your manager, so that should be your number one priority. It’s literally just doing what is asked of you according to your job description.

The next step is to do your job reliably. Your manager needs to know you are reliable and that they can count on you to complete the tasks you are assigned. Doing your job reliably does not mean you won’t make mistakes, your estimates will always spot on, or your projects will always be completed ahead of time. Nobody is perfect and timelines will slip, bugs will happen, and estimates will be wrong. That’s just a part of building software that you need to learn to live with. Being reliable means that your boss can count on you to take on a task and see it through to the finish line. The more often you do this, the more your boss will know that you can take on whatever they throw your way.

There’s more to being reliable than just completing your tasks. Here are some other examples of what it means to be someone your manager can rely on:

A reliable software engineer is someone who is predictable (that is, does what they say they will do) and who is able to complete their tasks from start to finish. Doing just these two things will help develop a good foundation of trust between you and your manager.

Understand Your Manager’s Goals

While your manager expects you to deliver results each quarter, they have their own goals, milestones, objectives, and key results that they need to deliver as well. They are responsible for all the work your team delivers. Understanding this point will help you better understand some of the decisions your manager makes.

As a software engineer, your job is to do everything you can to support your manager so they achieve their desired outcomes. Therefore, your manager’s goals are your own goals.

​important​ This is an important concept that not many engineers understand early in their careers, because most of them are primarily concerned with proving their technical abilities.

Your work is just one piece of the puzzle that your manager needs to solve. When you understand how your work fits into the bigger picture, you’ll be able to identify which tasks will help your manager reach their goals and prioritize those first. If you can manage to do this, you’ll almost certainly gain your manager’s trust. Conversely, if you hinder your manager’s ability to meet their objectives, you may lose the trust of your boss.

In the bad example above, you may think that you’re demonstrating your growing technical skills and showing your manager that you’re a good engineer who can solve difficult problems. The issue is that the tasks you worked on were not aligned with your manager’s priorities for the quarter, whereas in the good example, you helped your boss get closer to their goal of upgrading the programming language version. If you want to build trust with your boss, you need to figure out how to align your own goals with your manager’s goals.