Career development based on trust

Credibility and reliability, understanding the needs of others, and all this combined with low self-interest. According to David Maister, Charles Green and Robert Galford, these are the ingredients of trust. It’s true that some professionals are perceived as more trustworthy simply by virtue of the jobs they do (for example doctors and scientists) while others tend almost instinctively to elicit in us more distrust (as with politicians). Yet the trust equation in any professional context can represent a useful tool for reinforcing your personal career brand: the set of unique characteristics that make you as a professional special and attractive in the eyes of the market. Being trustworthy can be the clincher, what makes others see your professionalism as not just a market commodity, easy to find, easy to trade; instead they realize what you have to offer is hard to buy, an opportunity not to be missed. So trust turns into a source of competitive advantage in the workplace at every level.

Today there’s no longer any such thing as a linear career progression. Professional paths meander around in every direction - laterally, diagonally, and not always upward. So periodically reinventing yourself has become a must. ‘We are all CEOs in our own personal companies,’ says Tom Peters. So we are no longer defined by our job title or fenced in by a job description – each of us is a product with a specific brand, a brand that has to make us distinctive, attractive, recognizable, and above all, trustworthy.

In light of this, to properly plot your career path, you have to ask yourself the same questions that a brand manager would when considering what constitutes your professional specificities: What am I really good at? What makes me stand out from the crowd of my peers? What is my competitive advantage? What makes me particularly attractive? How can I earn the trust of my potential future employers?

There are essentially three elements that define your personal career brand:

• The aspects of your experience that have enabled you to grow professionally;
• The promise that you make to your potential employer, i.e. the problems that you can solve with your skills and talents;
• The motivations and values that guide you in your daily life and fuel your desire to grow and achieve.

To earn the trust of the people you engage with, you need to work consistently in all three directions. As for experience, for instance, the prerequisite for trust is not only your track record, but also indicators of your job stability, your demonstrated willingness to embrace international mobility, the level of professional relationships you handled in previous positions, and the career path you’ve been following over the years.

Second, the promise that you’ll make to your future employers must clearly be credible. This promise isn’t just about the unique traits that you can bring to the table and the problems you can solve, but more generally the benefits that you can provide to your future employers. In other words, you need to make them see what needs, desires, and aspirations you can satisfy, not only in terms of results as demonstrated by the numbers, but also by contributing to the life of the organization on a relational level. Lastly, it’s essential to transmit a set of motivations and values that are credible and that convey reliability. The ability to do so represents a key component of your personal career brand, and as such a potentially important source of competitive advantage.

In today’s business world, building trust around a personal career brand inevitably happens through myriad channels. The quality of the narrative that you compose is fundamental, but you also have to be able to transmit trust through the wide range of available touchpoints. These included physical touchpoints (the set of contexts and circumstances in which you come into contact with colleagues and acquaintances, from the workplace to industry events, without forgetting your good old paper CV) and virtual touchpoints (social networks, blogs and even simply the emails that you send). From the very first steps you take along your professional path (ideally starting at university), your priority is to build a positive reputation through a network of people who are willing to sing your praises sincerely and honestly.

When infusing your personal profile with trust, digital contexts represent particularly treacherous territory. The accessibility of these channels means that the personal information you publish online is readily available even to people you don’t know. It takes very little to undermine your credibility in the eyes of others (a photo, a post, a controversial comment). What’s more, the incentive for self-promotion comes almost naturally in digital environments - but this quickly descends into destructive forms of narcissism. So to shore up your credibility and earn others’ trust, the key is to communicate with honesty, authenticity, and above all impartiality.

Last of all, one thing you always need to keep in mind is that trust is not built in a day. Only by communicating the value of your brand with consistency and continuity over time, and behaving accordingly, can you procure a profile of credibility and reliability that is vital to your professional growth, in any sector and at any level. The world is shrinking, thanks in part to social media.