Build Trust - Walk the talk
No one will ever trust you if they believe you are only paying lip service to the ideas you espouse. You simply need to walk the talk. Earlier in my career, during the holiday season, we needed to make an emergency update to a core retail system. Not the ideal time of year to perform such a task, but the day of the deployment, our change introduced an issue with an auxiliary system. There was no dependency documented, but our changes had a negative downstream impact. We worked diligently to correct the issue, and were able to roll forward with one additional modification rather than rolling all the changes back. At the end of the day, a member of my development team asked me what the negative consequences would be for him for deploying the code bug. I simply stated that there would not be any; he had done all he could to test, fought to resolve the problem, and if anyone wanted to talk to him about it, they would have to fire me first! He looked stunned at my response. I filled him in on my thinking, that everyone knew there were risks associated with the change; we did not have adequate information about the auxiliary system and we had pulled off what had seemed impossible two weeks earlier, so one bump along the way was not going to have negative repercussions for my team. At least not while I worked there!
I needed to show him that my job was to ensure he had all the tools and resources to write great code, and that is all he owed me. All the other deadlines, pressures and politics were mine to handle for him. I trusted he would deliver the code, and he trusted me to clear his path to get things done. Sometimes in your relationships, there are inflection points when you get to put your money where your mouth is and walk the talk; make sure when these rare opportunities occur, you rise to meet them. Your team, bosses and customers will remember those events more than all the team meetings, statements of work and performance reviews you produce. When you know who you are and believe in what you are doing, walking the talk is easy.
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