Level Up Your Impact: Building Trust and Influence as an Engineer

20 Mar 2025 Level Up Your Impact: Building Trust and Influence as an Engineer

As engineers, we often focus heavily on technical skills, but to truly effect meaningful change within an organisation, building trust and gaining influence are equally important. Influence enables you to shape decisions, drive innovation, and ultimately deliver greater value. Let’s explore some practical strategies you can adopt to build trust and increase your influence as an engineer or leader.

Tenure and title matter (but aren’t everything)

While we often aspire for workplaces to be meritocracies, the reality is that titles and tenure play a significant role in how opinions are perceived. Clients and colleagues alike tend to place more trust in the opinions of senior figures, such as a chief engineer over an analyst. This isn’t about fairness; it’s simply human nature to gravitate towards hierarchies.

While you can’t always control your title or tenure, understanding this dynamic helps you navigate organisational relationships more effectively. If you’re early in your career or new at a company, recognise that you’ll need to proactively demonstrate your expertise and value to gain trust quickly.

Learn the organisation and its people

To truly make an impact, you need to understand the organisation’s goals and challenges. That’s because influence starts with understanding.

• Listen and Ask Questions: Engage with colleagues to understand their challenges and focus areas. This not only shows empathy but also helps you align your priorities with theirs.
• Understand the Business’s North Star: Familiarise yourself with the organisation’s overarching goals (where they need to get to) and the key performance indicators (KPIs) that measure success (what matters to the business). This will help you align your work with what matters most to the business.
• Pay Attention to Company-Wide Communications: Attend company All Hands meetings and pay attention to the focus areas being discussed. This will give you valuable insights into the company’s priorities. Aligning your own priorities and decision-making with these business goals will position you as someone who truly understands what’s important.

Provide regular updates

Clear and regular communication is crucial for building trust – especially in remote or hybrid environments. Personally, I’ve found that sending weekly updates to sponsors highlighting my focus areas and observations is invaluable in the early stages of a client relationship. This helps keep everyone informed and aligned. For example:

Hi John Doe,

I’m completing my 2^nd week at Acme Corp. The team have been very welcoming and I believe there’s a tremendous opportunity for me to add value to the engineering teams. Here’s a run down of what my personal focus areas have been as well as some observations.

Focus areas:

• Completed compliance training.
• Organised 1on1’s with engineering colleagues to understand their challenges and how I can help.
• Unblocked the XYZ team with the delivery of their MVP.
• Refining engineering KPIs to drive continuous improvements across the platform.

Observations:

• Opportunity to improve knowledge sharing and empower teams with tools and knowledge to deliver more efficiently.
• Documented standards and guardrails would prevent proliferation of bad practices such as…

Let me know if you have any questions, I’d be happy to discuss further.

Thanks,
Michael

This practice demonstrates transparency, keeps you visible within leadership circles, and helps scale your influence asynchronously and build trust across the organisation.

Use inclusive language

The way you communicate can significantly impact how others perceive your intentions. Using inclusive language like “our” instead of “your” can make a big difference.

Consider how differently these two statements might be received by a client:

• “I’ve noticed that your payment system is experiencing issues”
• “I’ve noticed that our payment system is experiencing issues”

The first statement triggers anxiety—it implies blame or distance from the problem. They now have an urgent problem they need to fix that will directly impact revenue. The second immediately signals partnership: we’re in this together.

This subtle change has a powerful impact. It shifts the focus from blame to collaboration, signalling that you’re invested in their success, and want to win together.

Demonstrate expertise

Technical expertise remains one of the most direct paths to earning trust among peers – especially engineers who are quick to assess technical competence.

• Know Your Stuff: Being knowledgeable in your domain is essential. For engineers, this means staying up-to-date with industry trends and how to apply them in the context of the organisation to solve problems, drive efficiency, or improve quality.
• Quick Learning: The ability to learn quickly is one of the most important skills for engineers to possess, especially for consultants. It shows adaptability and a willingness to grow.
• Voice Your Opinion: In design discussions, get comfortable clearly explaining your point of view, including the problem, your preferred solution, known unknowns, and trade-offs.

One thing to note is to always be honest. If you’re unsure about something, commit to researching further and coming back with to the table with a view.

Become a better writer

Writing eloquently doesn’t always come naturally to software engineers—but it’s a critical skill for influencing decision-making at scale. The most impactful engineers are often adept at writing clear documents that communicate their ideas persuasively.

Invest time to improve your writing skills: structuring documents, summarising technical concepts, articulating pros & cons, etc. One of the best ways to do this is to read documents from effective communicators in your organisation. This will help amplify your voice across teams and help you widen your sphere of influence.

Consistently delivering value

Ultimately, trust and influence are built on results. All the other strategies mean nothing if you’re not delivering tangible results that add value to the organisation. It’s also not enough to deliver; you must also ensure that people know about it! Visibility isn’t about boasting; it’s about clearly communicating how your efforts positively impact the business. Make a point of highlighting your achievements and tie them back to the value they bring to the business. This can be challenging for technical projects, but it’s essential for demonstrating impact.

When communicating your achievements, focus on the outcomes that matter most to the business. A quote I quite like goes: “surgeons don’t talk about washing hands, they talk about the success of operations.”. This means highlighting cost savings, performance improvements, or better user experiences—outcomes that are easily understood and valued by stakeholders.

Conclusion

Influence isn’t built overnight, but by thoughtfully applying these strategies—understanding the organisation, communicating clearly using inclusive language, demonstrating continuous learning alongside domain expertise, improving writing skills, consistently delivering valuable outcomes aligned with business goals, and ensuring visibility—you’ll steadily build trust among peers and stakeholders alike.

Do you have other effective strategies for building trust? Let me know!