Trust Over Titles: The Engineer's Guide to Workplace Influence

Do this instead of gunning for a promotion

Your influence at work isn't tied to your title. The trick to gaining influence is becoming a recognized expert by demonstrating reliability & capability. When you're known as the go-to person for something valuable, you'll naturally be included in critical conversations and decisions - whether they happen in meetings or Slack channels.

Influence is earned by demonstrating reliability and capability while building trust through relationships.

Influence is earned, not given

When studying for my new engineering management position¹, I stumbled across this quote:

Once again, we see a new manager fall into the trap of relying too heavily on his formal authority as his source of influence. Instead, he needs to build influence by creating a web of strong, interdependent relationships, based on credibility and trust, throughout his team and the entire organization — one strand at a time. — Linda Hill, Becoming the boss

New managers think that just because they have a fancy new title, people are going to listen to them. As a recent engineer turned manager, I can assure you that’s not always true. There are ICs in the company that have more clout than me or most managers. It bears repeating, a better title does not by default give you more influence.

Trust starts with credibility. You can’t bullshit your way into credibility. You have to earn it by displaying competence and reliability. How?

You deliver. The right thing. When you said you would. Repeatedly.

Displaying credibility in your day-to-day work

There is unspoken power in being the person who delivers the final product to the user. You likely have more say in your day-to-day to make an impact than you realize. Here are some ways you can have more impact and start to build credibility at work:

1. Prioritize high-impact work over low-hanging fruit

Given a list of tickets, I might ask myself: “Which of these will have the biggest impact on the user?” “Are there any quick wins or low-hanging fruit I can tackle?” Sometimes, I do an easy little ticket in the morning as a treat². As long as everything else is moving along, no one has ever complained about people making quality-of-life improvements of their own volition.

2. Prioritize quality

You can decide how much time you want to dedicate to quality. For example, I once built a new spending summary component for a debit card page. The designs didn’t call for animations, but I noticed the transitions felt clunky without them, so I took extra time to add them. The UI was higher quality because I decided it would be.

Everyone makes tradeoffs about time vs. quality³. Most people default to shipping faster. You can make yourself an outlier by moving in the other direction, even just a little bit. You must prefer visible product quality over invisible code quality, and you can’t go too far. No one wants to work with a slowpoke.

3. Write

If you take one action after reading this article, it should be to write and share a document at work.

Writing standards docs. By writing a resource about accessibility guidelines and common patterns, I helped indirectly increase how accessible our application was, not just in my department but company-wide. So few engineers are willing to take the time to write quality documentation, policy, and standards. Being the one to do it is a superpower.

Building trust & strengthening relationships

Competence is essential, but it isn’t the whole game. Many developers are good at writing code but only good at writing code. They don’t understand why they are limited in their career. Software is a team sport⁴. You have to build trust with others.

Building trust takes time—one person at a time, one conversation after another. The only way to build a cathedral is brick by brick.

Be honest, even in shortcomings, especially in your shortcomings. Managers hate surprises. If you’re going to miss a deadline, let them know upfront. The sooner, the better.

Getting along with people isn’t required, but it sure helps. Pedro Pascal sums up the attitude nicely:

“I know how to get along with everybody but it doesn’t mean I like everybody.” — (source, X fka Twitter⁵)

Take a human interest in people. Know the name of every dog, cat, and child your coworkers are responsible for.

Be genuinely likable. I’m pretty mid at coding. Most of my career success comes from being charismatic and funny. If people don’t like working with you, you’ll be included in fewer conversations. Thus, fewer relationships, therefore less power. Few of us are truly “changing the world” and could afford to be more playful at work.

Wielding influence

You’ll have opportunities to use your influence as you become more trusted. Start small. 1-on-1 conversations over big pitches.

Favor asking good questions over offering specific advice. As Micheal Bungay Stringer says in The Coaching Habit: Tell less and ask more. Your advice is not as good as you think it is. Questions are more valuable than many realize.

Pick your battles. You can’t win everything.

Share your influence generously. You can help others gain influence. You can give a voice to the voiceless. You can shine a light on people that deserve it.

And remember to use this influence for good. It gives you a unique opportunity to help your company, customers, and coworkers.

And y’know, make your product better and get a raise and a promotion. You don’t have to do all this for free ;)

1. Found in HBR's 10 Must Reads for New Managers, a resource that was a lot more useful than the listicle title would lead you to believe.

2. It is an effective way to fight back against burnout, especially if you have been stuck on a slow-moving slog with little progress to show for it.

3. It’s more of haste vs. quality. The “fast, cheap, good” triangle has been debunked. Shipping faster leads to higher quality over time. But that’s a tangent for another day.

4. And the bigger the company you work for, the more essential these skills become

5. I couldn't find a non-Nazi-platform version of this clip. Figured this was better than nothing. Pascal’s charm is lost when translated into text.