Trust is the firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone.
Rapport is how smooth and harmonious your relationship is with other employees.
When establishing yourself in a new role, you need to develop both trust and rapport with your key stakeholders.
The ABCD model describes how your behaviors impact building or eroding trust.
Trust and rapport can be used to build strong working relationships to help you win projects, garner support and cut through bureaucracy to execute quickly.
Most companies have the 'official' way information and processes are supposed flow through the organization — called a formal network. In reality, there are is the way things actually get done, call the ***informal* network.**
These are the relationships employees form across teams and departments to get things done efficiently. However, they can also be used against you to oppose changes and stall initiatives.
Informal networks are a powerful resource and when used correctly it can help your team, department or organization increase their performance.
A regional bank branch found that nonhierarchical branches (one with strong informal networks) were 70% more profitable than branches with top-down communication between “superiors” and staff.
Examples
by Jeanette Jordan
Building Trust & Rapport....
I was a Product Marketing team lead at a tech startup and my Product Management counterpart was keeping crucial information from me and my team. My team was highly skilled, high performing and clear in our approach but for some reason, we were consistently stonewalled.
To help get unblocked, I invited my Product Manager out for lunch, to know him better and I didn't discuss work at all. We found common interests in distance running, travel, food and photography.
After taking a genuine interest in him, consistently asking about his pets, his training for marathons, and his latest cooking projects, I noticed our work relationship got easier. I was able to uncover that he was concerned my team would leak information to the market before it was ready, I assured him we wouldn't and kept my word, which enabled us to have a better working relationship.
Understanding Informal Networks....
I used to work with a very difficult sales manager who missed their goals and sales targets for over 4 years in a row. In response to missing their sales targets, they consistently blamed marketing, sales operations and client services.
The heads of those departments tried to use their power and political capital to get the sales manager fired and it never works.
When I started, I asked the sales manager why he joined the company and he openly shared our CEO was his college roommate. This helped me and my boss understand the informal network and despite his performance, he was not going to get fired because he was a trusted source of information to the CEO.
We learned to build powerful relationships with other sales representatives to ensure our projects were successful.
In the ABCD Trust framework, the first step to building is demonstrating your competence and ability. For this example, let's say you're an onboarding specialist and your job is to help new customers use your product.
Consider the following ways you can showcase your skills:
Trust is the cornerstone of relationships. The next step in the ABCD trust framework is to be believable. Be honest, fair, and act with integrity always.
A few ways to demonstrate your trustworthiness:
✅ Be honest and clearly say no if your customer asks you if the product can do something it cannot. Feel free to recommend other ways to help or document the feature request.
🚫 Do NOT change your metrics to reflect your goals. If something took longer than it was supposed to, document the reasons and propose potential changes to speed the process.
Demonstrate you care. This step of the ABCD Trust framework is to be connected. Take a genuine interest in others. Communicate regularly and ask about their priorities and interest both inside and outside of work.
A few questions to consider are:
You can also try the 36 Questions from the Love Lab. Here is Set 1:
Be your word! It's important when you are building trust that you demonstrate reliability. This step of the ABCD Trust framework is all about dependability. To show you are dependable, you should be responsive to questions, be accountable for your mistakes and communicate early and often.
If a customer reaches with a question or a service request:
🚫 Do NOT wait until you have the answer/solved the problem to respond to the inquiry.
✅ Reply immediately to say you received the email and let them know you are working on the requires and they can expect to hear back in 48-72 hours.