After a turbulent few years in tech, several of my personal and professional contacts have been changing roles and onboarding onto new teams. I recently onboarded onto a new team myself, which has made me revisit the mental models I use for onboarding. This has served me well in a variety of contexts: starting as a new hire, changing teams, getting acquired, leading a new team, and so on.

Onboarding is about building trust, and I’ve come to think about accruing trust in terms of a balance that can be built up and drawn down - like money in a bank account. If you do well, you build up a surplus and can use that balance to “spend” to help you deliver on your mandate. If you do poorly, the account drains and it erodes your credibility and ability to execute. Though uncomfortable at times, keeping a mental tab on where this invisible “balance” stands has been a good bellwether for how your new role is going.

It’s worth noting none of this is fair. You may be doing an excellent job and not reaping any of the benefits of your great work, and sometimes you may be doing a poor job and everyone is too busy to notice. Regardless, it’s important to understand in the world of onboarding that perception is reality, and understanding how others perceive you and your work will be a strong predictor of how effective your time will be at a company.

The invisible balance we carry

When a professional steps into a new role, usually their account balance of trust capital starts near zero. No one really expects a whole lot out of you (initially), but they also don’t expect you to screw up too much. You were hired for a reason, right?

By virtue of showing up and doing the expected job, you will slowly accrue trust from your manager, your peers, and your team as time progresses. Positive events (delivering a key project, relieving a struggling team, fixing a persistent problem) will lead to surer footing in the organization. Negative events (showing up to meetings late, missing key deadlines, losing a client, poor delivery) will drain this trust balance and make getting things done an uphill battle.

You must work to accrue this capital over time, or risk seeing it dissipate - I have found it best to see it in a state of flux. Throughout my career, I've taken on new roles, leadership promotions, acquisitions, and navigated reorgs. Each situation carries exciting opportunities, yet is fraught with the challenge of re-establishing oneself against the backdrop of a fresh set of relationships.

Why should I care about my “trust capital?”

While this may seem trivial, this is the currency that you will use to facilitate transactions at work. Items like:

Generating buy-in for proposals you might have
Giving you some execution buffer if a project doesn’t go according to plan
Getting peers to cover for you when you’re on leave, vacation, or need to offload items
Advocating for yourself to take on new opportunities and positions
Reducing the friction / scrutiny of delivery, giving you more autonomy to carry out your duties

Much like having an emergency fund for that unexpected car repair or medical bill, a strong balance of trust with the people you work with will give you breathing room to deliver. The faster you can accrue it, the better for all involved.

Case Studies in Changing Trust Balances

Steady Increase Over Time

For most people in a functioning workplace this is (hopefully) the default. You show up, you do the work, you solve problems, and people are happy you joined the team. A good tactic here is to underpromise and overdeliver so team members see you as dependable and effective. An example: in my first job, I made a point to consistently deliver. When a role opened up in a more exciting division of the company, I was able to trade in some of this good will for backing to transfer.

Early Jackpot

You might hit the jackpot early in tenure. A big opportunity comes up and you’re uniquely positioned to execute, or a disaster happens and you can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. This might be fixing a critical bug in the system, saving a big client, winning a big contract, or quickly landing a key project. What is unique about these situations is you can pack multiple months of trust building into a single event, giving you a headstart on building your trust capital. This doesn’t happen often, but you should be aware if a chance presents itself.

At one startup I joined, our biggest customer was threatening to cancel their contract unless we were able to deliver a new feature on an impossibly tight schedule. I paired with an engineer to spec and build the feature in my first two weeks, and as a result the customer didn’t churn. This established me as someone who “solves problems” in the mind of the CEO, and set the stage for a pretty rapid ascent at the company. It became much easier to get things done since I had established my value in short order.

Early Crash & Recovery

Sometimes the opposite happens. You might experience a dangerous crash in your trust capital early on, forcing a long road back to neutral balance. At another startup, a significant bug was discovered in my second month which undermined confidence in our system. Since I was still learning the product, the team, and the tech stack, I was slow to respond, and unable to muster an effective response that would assuage some of the executive team’s concerns about the health of our platform. What started as a successful tenure quickly turned into a trust deficit that took me about 12 months to claw my way out of. It took consistent delivery, proactive communication, and going above and beyond what I ordinarily would have had to do. Unfortunately, sometimes you are overcome by events outside your control.

Steady Decrease Over Time

While I haven't personally experienced a steady decline in trust capital (or at least detected it), I've seen it happen to others. A new hire would fumble their first few assignments, be unresponsive to requests, show up late for key meetings, and fail to inspire confidence in key leaders. Overtime, murmurs of doubt about whether this is the right person for the position turned into outright dissent, and usually ended with the person parting ways with the company. This can happen at the entry level, middle management, or executive level - no one is immune to this kind of downward pressure on their credibility.

Trust balance has a reinforcing property

Sometimes the trust balance itself can impact how an event is registered. For example, the same perceived mistake may only cause a blip in a perceived “high-achiever’s” trust capital, while proving damning for someone who is on their way to being written off. This likely plays into peoples’ confirmation bias - if someone had made up their mind that you’re a well-to-do professional, a missed deadline will be assumed to be due to circumstances outside your control. On the other hand, if there’s already doubt as to your fitness for the role, the same error will carry a disproportionate negative impact, diminishing your stature to a greater extent.

Expanding the model - distinct relationships

This obviously is an over simplification of the incredibly nuanced topic of human relationships. Most people work with a variety of people and teams, and their relationships are unique for each entity. While one’s overall “reputation” will be developed in the first few months in a new role, there are some nuances to consider.

Your trust balance will differ from person to person

Within your team, your rate of trust capital with each person will develop at different rates due to a number of factors: time spent with certain teammates, level of collaboration, initial dispositions, competition for resources, and so on. While earlier in this post I treated this balance of trust capital a global balance, in reality you carry balances with everyone you meet.

To this end, it’s important to know which of these relationships are most important for you to invest in, as you only have a finite amount of time to do so. In most cases this will be your manager: can they trust you will get the job done and carry out your duties effectively? Shoring this up is always a good idea, as it will make doing your job much easier and create a powerful advocate for your time at the company. However, there may be cases where other colleagues will be critical to build rapport with - old timers who know the ins and outs of the company, gate keepers to key stakeholders, collaborators on whom you’ll depend.

Your team carries a balance that you may inherit

Your team or organization also can carry its own balance with other parts of the organization, and this will influence the starting point for your balance at the company. If your team has had a rocky couple of projects with sales, engineering, or some other department, you can expect that you won’t be starting from a neutral plane. Being aware of the intra-team dynamics will help you understand how far you need to go to win the trust of different parts of the organization - in some cases it will be easier as you carry a halo effect from your department, other times it may work against you.

It’s not just about onboarding

This model is especially useful during the first precious months at a company, as this is when you will be assessed and impressions are sticky. However, these principles apply basically to any interaction with other people at work. Once you have an established reputation, it will be harder to add to or subtract from your trust capital balance (the value is more “locked in place”), but movement still can and will happen.

A few key takeaways

Be aware that you (and everyone around you) carries a balance of trust with the people around you. You should protect it at all costs!
Keep tabs on your surroundings and look to deliver wins when chances present themselves, and extinguish fires that could undermine others’ trust in you to do the job. These are vital moments you must not waste.
The easiest way to build this account is to underpromise and overdeliver consistently.
Unfortunately, perception is reality. Even if events aren’t “your fault,” if you’re overcome by them, it will take tremendous effort to recoup lost trust, if ever.
If you care to be more advanced, don’t just apply this method as a global pool of trust capital, but assess your balance for key colleagues and teams.
My recommendation for applying a framework like this is to assume positive intent. I try to assume any lack of trust from another person isn’t malicious or sinister, but moreso that someone is cautiously assessing whether to invest time in me as a coworker against other pressing priorities. Give it time and keep doing solid work and generally things get sorted out.
It's worth noting this assumes a semi-functioning workplace and work culture. I have been exposed to plenty of organizations where toxicity or politics reduces this model's effectiveness, because other corrosive intangibles are at play.

Trust Capital: A Currency for Onboarding