Predictability as a precursor to trust

For your professional relationships to be fruitful, you’ll need to establish a baseline level of trust. These days, showing some vulnerability gets all the attention, and while that’s a helpful step, it’s not sufficient in isolation. For you and your counterparty to trust each other in a way that will help you to work productively together, you’ll need to be able to reasonably predict each other’s range of reactions most of the time.

This isn’t a marriage; you’re not looking to complete each other’s sentences. But you do both need to know whether you can raise a potentially contentious line of reasoning and get a productive response, and over time, learn what buttons to avoid in order to stay in a professional state of mind.

A great start to this is just to directly ask how they’d behave in another person’s shoes: “If you were leading this team, what changes would you make?” “If X had brought that issue to you like that, how would you have responded?” By using a circular question like this, you can take yourself out of the hypothetical situation to begin with, and then if appropriate, share your own response as well to help your counterparty to understand (and, slowly, to trust) you.