How to Drive Meaningful Change - Establish credibility
Driving changes requires credibility. Building credibility requires not just you, but others.
Everyone can benefit from understanding and knowing how to build influence, implement change, and shape the organization and culture.
Much of it relies on learning and understanding the soft skill of navigating organizational politics.
This article is part of my series How to Drive Meaningful Change.
Establishing credibility
Establish your credibility
Credibility = Proven Competence + Integrity + Relationships
- Chris Fussel, “One Mission “
Credibility is the trust your organization has in you. Trust is a key factor in driving organizational changes.
Organizational change requires participation across many people across a company. Each one has their own perception of you. For them to buy in and take the time to support your idea, they need to trust you.
If nobody trusts you, they’ll disregard what you say even if you are 100% correct. Even if you have authority, your authority has limits. You can’t just keep snapping your fingers and getting things done without breaking your organization.
Building credibility requires competency, relationship-building, and time.
Do your job well and build a track record
There’s no better way to prove your point than with overwhelming competence. If you’re excellent at what you do to the point where nobody can argue with the method or results, driving forward change becomes a lot easier. You have a history of credibility to fall back on, and people are willing to give you more leeway even if they aren’t fully sold on your idea because you’ve pulled through in the past.
People look to those who can deliver. If you don’t have a track record of delivering, you won’t have the credibility to ask for change. Start with quick wins. Don’t tackle a massive challenge day one. Find a small pain point and solve it. Then the next, and the next, and the next. Build up a track record before you need it.
You can’t rely on authority forever
I see a lot of new executives and leaders fall into this trap when they enter a new organization. They come in and demand changes to everything, not understanding or appreciating the context of the organization. They rely on their authority.
Initially, it works. These demands are followed because of the authority granted by their title, and not through merit of the idea or trust in the leader. People are willing to give the benefit of doubt. The new leader has the excuse of “being new” when they make mistakes.
However, it wears off quickly. As time goes on, competency and proven success at the organization becomes more important. If a leader keeps making mistakes and relying on authority to push things through, they’ll start to receive pushback. They don’t have excuses to fall back on for their bad decisions. When failure does happen, it marks the leader as a poor decision-maker, and the trust is lost with the team.
With enough trust lost, resentment starts to occur. It gets harder to rely on authority to push things through. People might actually be rooting for things to go wrong or put minimal effort into preventing failure, further driving poorer outcomes.
The loss of trust makes it harder for that leader to affect future changes successfully.
The importance of credibility
At a former company, our CEO hired his longtime friend to become the new Head of Development, without a single interview from anyone on the team.
My new boss came in and surprisingly fired several people in his first day. With the tone set, he started making demands left and right about changes he was making to practice, process, and technology.
It became evident over the weeks that this individual knew nothing about how to do the job. Basic concepts needed to be explained to him, and his orders consistently contained things that had no bearing on the actual problem, context, or solution space. He brute-forced his decisions through with his authority, causing significant issues and problems, which he then quickly blamed on the team.
He wasn’t just in the wrong ballpark, he wasn’t even playing the same sport. I attempted to guide him, privately giving him feedback on his decisions and doing my best to ensure successful execution. We had many perfectly implemented things with terrible organizational consequences. As he made more and more uninformed, indefensible decisions, he quickly lost credibility with the entire development organization he was leading.
With all of the problems occurring as a result of his poor decision-making, executive pressure started mounting. What was previously a well-run organization ground to a halt, and leadership wanted to know what the problem was. My boss tried to shift the blame on to me and claimed that I was not competent.
This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. At the organization, I had a significant amount of credibility built up with many, many, many wins - my track record was undeniable to even the uninformed. When his negative credibility challenged my positive credibility, most of the development organization threatened to quit - myself included.
The CEO, finally realizing his mistake, quickly transitioned that individual to a different role with no authority and little interaction with the development organization, and placed me in charge.
Build relationships with others
There’s an idea of a relationship "bank account”.
When you support others and help them achieve their outcomes, you make deposits into your “bank account” with that other person. When you detract from their efforts, ask for favors, or block their successes, you make withdrawals. If you try to withdraw more than you’ve deposited, it doesn’t work.
It’s a bit of a transactional mental model, but it’s a useful one: find out how you can support people before expecting them to do stuff for you.
If you haven’t built up any credibility, you can’t ask for large favors. Help others first.
Be careful to not start viewing everything as a transaction! Nobody likes a slimy politician.
There’s a lot of ways to support people:
Do something for them
Give them information they need
Help them achieve their goal
Help them build their own credibility
Help them avoid a problem
Give them a useful insight
It first starts with talking to that person and figuring out what they need and what they want.
Help others without creating problems for them
Helping others is a great way to support them and build trust. However - it is a double-edged sword. If done incorrectly, trying to help people can get you viewed as an interloper or someone who is overstepping their bounds.
If you want to support someone - ask if they want help. Be sure your help is actually desired.
It’s especially important to not seek credit when helping others. If you help someone, and then try to get credit for it, then it can be viewed extremely negatively and harm the relationship. Look at it from the perspective of others on that person you helped:
Is that person not able to do their own job?
Should I go to you now for this thing that this other person has owned in the past?
Many people want help, but few want to look bad to get it.
If you do help, stay in the shadows. Don’t draw attention to the fact you helped. It helps you help others when ego isn’t a consideration or factor.
True, genuine help builds trust. Selfish help does not.
Don’t engage in unhealthy office politics
Unhealthy office politics are things like:
Gossiping about co-workers
Telling people who don’t have any business to know things other people told you in confidence
Complaining to people about things they reasonably have no authority or influence to effect
Fostering bitterness, negative sentiment, or venting
These are all thing that are organizationally unhealthy. That is, it might feel good to do them, but they don’t help the organization improve or operate effectively. At their worst, they can feed into negative sentiment and cause churn and dysfunction.
If you’re trying to build credibility, you need to stay out of unhealthy office politics.
For one - people will eventually find out. Many people accidentally or intentionally leak will leak something. What you told them, even if it was a private opinion on something , may eventually makes its way back to the party involved— this may be accidental or intentional.
Imagine trying to get buy-in on a cross-functional idea from someone who later learns you’ve talked poorly about their competency to their report. Imagine you talk poorly about your boss to their boss while looking to get promoted. These situations can quickly degrade any credibility you have built.
Every organization has a grapevine of communication. People talk to each other. While you want to be aware of what the grapevine is saying, you never want to push unhealthy politics through it. Be aware it exists, but stay above it.
I once had a report complain about my decision-making to everyone who would listen, but never to myself.
In discussions with them, they agreed, nodded their head, and never raised issues. Others did bring up their own issues through various means, and they were factored in or incorporated when relevant. It was just this one individual who was clearly not bought in to anything I did.
Even in anonymous surveys, the feedback was never expressed. However, in their direct chats with others they pointed out what they thought were flaws in me left and right, including several leadership peers, my reports, and others completely unrelated to the initiatives in the organization. They even noted they were slow-rolling things I worked on, hoping I would fail so their approaches would be considered instead.
Obviously, this quickly made its way back to me. I asked them for feedback explicitly, and they continued to express positivity and full-throated support.
At that point, I terminated the individual. If they weren’t bought in, they didn’t want to give feedback, they didn’t want to help improve the situation, and they had no contribution other than complaining about things, then they didn’t need to be at a company under a leader they completely disagreed with.
An important distinction
Unhealthy gossiping about others or complaining is different than earnestly discussing problems or validly making comparisons. The difference is in the ability of the people involved in the conversation to resolve the issue, or the need-to-know of the information being discussed.
For example:
Two managers talking about a report’s underperformance for the purposes of calibration or sharing ideas is perfectly fine (and should be promoted). The managers can support each other, both can be reasonably expected to have access to the information, and their conversation can help improve the situation.
A manager discussing weaknesses about another manager to that manager’s report is not fine. The report has no need to discuss this, has no ability to improve it, and it decreases the authority of another manager over their own team.
Two low-level people venting about the company’s decisions to each other is likely unhealthy. On the unhealthy side, it decreases the trust of both parties in the strategy, doesn’t send the information anywhere useful, and will likely not result in any meaningful change. However, what can make it healthy is if they share ideas for how to effectively navigate situations or improve their understanding of the tradeoffs and factors involved in the company’s decisions.
Establishing credibility is key to driving changes. Without it, you can’t even get to propose your ideas as they won’t be taken seriously.