Building trusting relationships takes time. They must be earned, piece by piece, through consistent actions. This became very clear to me when I transitioned from a role I had held for 20 years at Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP) to a new position at Knight-Hennessy Scholars. For two decades I had accumulated goodwill at the engineering school and assumed that all that trust would naturally carry over with me. It didn’t… I was entering a new social network, one in which my past reputation held little weight. The people in this new environment had no experience working with me, and trust doesn’t transfer by default.
Building trust in my new role was complicated by the COVID-19 lockdown. With everything remote, the organic, in-person moments of connection were missing. Instead, every interaction was more formal and transactional. When I ran a workshop for the entire community of nearly two hundred students at our first in-person retreat, a student stood up to answer a question and continued standing after answering. I told the student that they “could sit down.” My comment, innocently made, was interpreted as rude. Students, whom I had never met in person before, were quick to interpret my casual comment as a criticism, and some students chose to spread doubt about my leadership of the organization. The situation was taking on a life of its own. What should I do?
After much consideration, I decided to send a note to the community with the hope of turning things around. My letter said, “I am very sorry about my comment. If I could go back and do it again, I certainly would have handled the situation differently. . . . We are at the beginning of our story together. I hope we can write the next chapter where we move on and take the time to really get to know each other and to build trust. My door is always open, and I am eager to talk with anyone who wants to discuss this further.”
The fact that I was willing to acknowledge the awkward situation and apologize for how my comment landed stopped the bleeding and allowed me to return to the task of building trust in the community. Several students who graduated that year sent me notes acknowledging that my letter was a turning point in their attitude toward me and an important leadership lesson for them.
Little by little, through consistent engagement, I could feel trust begin to build. Students were starting to assume the best rather than the worst and stopped questioning my intentions. I finally breathed a sigh of relief. It was a profound lesson: Trust isn’t something you own but something you continuously earn.
This is an edited excerpt from What I Wish I Knew About Luck, which will be released in one month, on April 21.
