Building Trust Will Grow Your Influence With Your Boss.

Influencing up is an important skill to master. While there is tons of literature on leadership, there is not a lot on followership. Followership can loosely be defined as the ability to understand a leader's vision and help them bring it to life. Followership differs from leadership in that, as a follower, you have less organizational power, fewer resources at your disposal, and competition for your leader's attention. In this article, we will explore followership and how you can gain more influence with your leader by focusing on building trust.

Trust is Built Through Action

Your boss has more pressure and obligations than you imagine. They are responsible for all of the work you and your peer do. In addition, the higher you are within an organization, the more cross-functional responsibilities you have. It is common for senior leaders in organizations to be overscheduled and overstressed, which can have negative impacts on focus, decision-making, and executive function. These negative effects tend to roll downhill, creating a culture of false urgency, unproductive collaboration, and missed opportunity.

When you recognize that your boss is not listening or working well with you, the first thing you should do is pause and ask, "How can I reduce the pressure and stress that my boss is feeling?" Everyone appreciates help when it is presented in the right way. The first and most important way you can help your boss is by doing your job at a high level. Beyond that, seek to understand where you might be able to add incremental value to your boss while positioning yourself to become a trusted advisor over time.

Building on Your Role As Advisor

Most leaders recognize that they have blind spots. Leaders who are worth following surround themselves with people who provide data and insights that help them understand how their business is performing. If you are looking to become one of these individuals, you have to be seen as someone reliable and trustworthy. Information is most useful when you believe the person who is providing it, and when it is directly applicable to the problems that need to be solved. As you build your relationship with your boss, focus on being consistent and efficient in providing helpful information, suggestions, and questions that solve business problems.

How Do You Become a Trusted Advisor?

It takes time to build a trusting relationship with your boss. It starts with you making small investments around being on time for work, doing the tasks that you are assigned, and consistently being forthright about challenges and obstacles. By executing what you are asked to do, you establish credibility with your boss. Over time, this credibility can grow into trust, which will provide opportunities for you to share your opinions, thoughts, and ideas.

Whenever your boss comes to you with a problem, and you can provide a solution, you expand your influence with your boss. Think of delivering results as building a bridge of trust. Each time you help solve a problem, another brick is laid, strengthening your relationship with your boss.

How is Trust Eroded?

When you disappoint, fail to deliver, or provide inaccurate or hard-to-understand information, you erode trust. No one can be perfect all of the time, but when interacting with your boss, you want to put forth effort towards presenting the best version of yourself. Take time to understand what is important to your boss. If possible, create a checklist of things you should do before handing in assignments to your boss or sitting down with them for a one-on-one.

Each time you complete a task that your boss sees or interacts with them in a meeting, you are creating a snapshot in time. That snapshot can be positive or negative. Your goal is to create more positive snapshots than negative ones. When you make a mistake, own it and do all that you can to correct it. This will help to minimize the impact of mistakes, and place you back on the path of becoming a trusted advisor.

Communication matters

Once you have established a strong trust bridge, you can begin the process of influencing your leader. Having a good relationship is the first step in the process. The next step in the influence process is communicating brief, clear, and compelling information to your leader.

• Being brief is important because the higher your leader is in an organization, the more people pull on their time and attention. Your ability to summarize complex ideas into a 5 to 10-minute conversation is essential to getting your leader's attention and getting them to care about the information you have to share.

• Being clear is essential because your leader likely does not have time to help you flush out your ideas or help you refine your logic. Test your ideas with a trusted peer and ask them to help you refine your thinking before presenting a new concept, idea, or solution to your boss. Once it is clear to others, present it to your boss.

• Being compelling is important because there are always competing priorities and perspectives. Your idea needs to be better than the others your leader is presented with. If you want buy-in, you must present solutions that feel like no-brainers because they are easy to understand and can provide a qualifiable benefit to your leader.

Summary

Building your followership skills is essential in growing your capability as a leader. It may seem counterintuitive, but all great leaders started off as great followers. Being a great follower can give you more face-time opportunities with your leader, greater influence within your organization, and incremental opportunities to take on important, high-profile work.

Being a great follower starts with executing your role at a high level and then providing insight and perspective that helps your leader and organization perform at a higher level.

One word of caution: not all leaders deserve great followers. Do your due diligence in identifying leaders to follow that align with your ethics, values, and beliefs. If you are going to go all in on supporting someone else's success, you want to be confident that it will be a mutually beneficial relationship.

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I am a father, husband, executive coach, and former retail executive. My coaching expertise comes from 21 years of leading operations, sales, and marketing teams. I understand what it is like to feel stuck, undervalued, and underappreciated.

I also know what it takes to invest in professional development, climb the corporate ladder, and find fulfillment at work.

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3 Ways to Make a More Inclusive Workplace

As workforces continue to get more diverse, leaders must be increasingly purposeful in designing fair and equitable workplaces. Research shows that leaders are more likely to hire individuals that they identify as being like them (1). In addition, leaders are more likely to give raises and promotions to individuals of their same gender (1). This is a factor in the underpaying of women, and the lack of diversity at the top of most organizations. Cultures influenced by similarity biases based on gender, race, age, sexual preference, ethnicity, or religion leave minority groups feeling like they must work twice as hard to get a head. This can lead to burnout, employee turnover and employee disengagement. For companies to get more out of their work force, they must put energy against reducing similarity bias that create barriers for the advancement of minority groups. Minority members of organizations would contribute more value to organizations if they received similar levels of recognition, rewards, and development as their majority member counterparts. The act of improving inclusion creates the opportunity for all employees to have equal access to resources, information, and personal development. This positions companies to benefit from more employees being engage in value creation. Building a more inclusive workplace starts with leaders being aware of their biases and taking purposeful action to be fair and consistent in their interactions with employees.

The first step to building a more inclusive workplace is to evaluate how you are spending your time.

Time is our scarcest resources, and often our biases impact who we spend time with. During my time leading teams, I would periodically audit the amount of time I spent interacting with my direct reports. By reviewing the amount of time, I spent with employees, along with the frequency of phone calls, text messages and emails, I was able to get a good picture of who I was interacting with the most. With this information, I could identify any biases in my behavior, and take purpose action to shift how I was spending my time.

The second step to building a more inclusive workplace is to be curious.

When you take the time to connect with people on a personal level, you build empathy. Empathy is the glue the keeps people together. You can fight the impact of race, age, gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, and religion similarity biases by being curious about people. When you take the time to learn about people’s values, dreams, character, and passions you will find that you have a lot in common with those you work with, even if they are physically different from you or come from different background. By being curious, and asking people questions, you communicate to others that you care about who they are and that you see them. By going deeper, and really getting to know people, you build the foundation for trust and inclusion.

The final suggestion for building a more inclusive workplace is to solicit feedback.

Your perception does not define another person’s reality. The best way to identify if you are creating an inclusive workplace is to ask those that you work with how you are doing at making everyone feel like a valued member of the team. To get candor, it is critical that you take action to let people know that you genuinely care about creating an inclusive work environment. You accomplish this by following the first two steps of allocating your time fairly and being curious. These actions set the stage for you to build trust which is a prerequisite for candor. Once you establish trust, those you work with will be more likely to be candid with you. When you ask your team their impression of inclusion in your workplace, you must listen and suspend judgement. Everyone’s experience is different and the purpose of you asking is not to influence their opinion, but to seek their perspective. Once you get feedback, it is critical that you take steps to help the individual feel more included.

I remember a conversation with a direct report that shared with me that she felt that I gave preferential treatment to her male co-workers that I occasionally went to happy hour with. As a mother she prioritized going home after work to spend time with her family, over meeting at a local spot and talking business with her peers and her boss. Prior to talking with her, I was unconscious of the unlevel playing field I was creating. Her peers had an extra 2 to 4 hours a month interacting with me which did influence my awareness of their work, along with providing them with the opportunity to receive incremental coaching from me. Her point was 100% valid. By me meeting with a portion of my team and without her being included, I was eroding trust and providing special treatment. She was the only one courageous enough to say anything, but her opinion was shared by other members of the team that also prioritized other non-work-related activities over happy hour. To address her concerns, I significantly reduced the frequency of these outings, along with the duration of time I spent in after hour activities with direct reports. As I matured as a leader, and gained more sensitivity around inclusion, I eventually eliminated most non-work-related socializing with direct reports to create a more level playing field.

The fact is that changing behaviors and norms within a company takes time and resources which raises the business question of whether companies should invest in building more inclusive workforces. There was a time when the leaders perceived the workforce to be so homogenous that companies had little reason to allocate time on inclusion efforts. The culture of organizations was so strong, that they could pressure individuals to conform. In addition, during that time periods employees’ perception of work were different. Previous generations expected to work for one company their entire life which made them more willing to go along to get along. As the workforce grows in diversity, and employees’ expectations around work change, companies risk losing talent if they do not focus on being inclusive. Employees today are more willing to leave their place of employment if they feel like they do not fit in, do not see equity in their treatment or feel that they are not getting a fair opportunity to advance their careers. As more females, people of color, English as a second language and LGBTQIA workers enter the American workforce, organizations must evolve, and leaders must work to connect with individuals that on the surface might look, speak, or act different from them. We are all human beings and share more in common than we differ. Leaders must take the time to get to know the people they work with and be purposeful in being inclusive.

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Dorian Cunion is an Executive Business Coach with your Path Coaching and Consulting. He specializes in coaching service for managers, executives and small business owner.

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If you are interested in working with me as a coach, contact me at

• Email: dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com

• Phone: 804-220-5771

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Resources

1. Grant, G. (August 7th, 2018). Similar-To-Me Bias: How Gender Affects Workplace Recognition. Forbes. Retrieved November 7, 2022, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/georginagrant/2018/08/07/similar-to-me-bias-how-gender-affects-workplace-recognition/?sh=51e35f8e540a