Relationships & Trust

As an engineer, your influence came from your technical ability. You wrote good code, you understood the system, people came to you with hard problems. That credibility was earned through output.

As an EM, that equation changes. Your influence now comes primarily from relationships — from how much your team trusts you, how well your manager trusts your judgment, and how much your cross-functional peers trust that you'll follow through. Technical credibility still matters, but it's table stakes. Relationship capital is what actually moves things.

Why This Is Harder Than It Sounds

Building trust takes time, and new managers often try to shortcut it. They make fast decisions to look decisive. They skip the early relationship-building conversations because they feel soft or inefficient. They focus on delivering results before they've established the relationships that make delivering results possible.

The managers who build trust fast do the opposite: they listen more than they talk in the first 30 days, they invest in one-on-ones before they're forced to have hard conversations in them, and they make their manager feel informed before their manager has to ask.

What This Chapter Covers

Three lessons:

• Managing Up and Sideways — building the relationships above and beside you, not just below you
• Remote and Hybrid Management — how trust-building changes when you're not in the same room
• Dependencies and Roadblocks — how you navigate the relationships needed to unblock your team

By the end of this chapter you'll have a clear approach for building trust quickly with the people you need most — your team, your manager, and your peers.