No one is moved by a person they do not believe in

You cannot influence someone who does not trust you. Everything else in this series is built on that one sentence. You can be the clearest communicator in the company. You can lead with your point, speak the listener's language, and make an argument with no holes in it. And if the person hearing you does not trust you, it all bounces off. They will nod, find a reason the timing is wrong, and quietly go their own way. Because underneath every professional conversation, there is a question the other person is always asking, usually without realising it: can I believe what this person is telling me, and are they on my side or just their own?

Trust is not the soft part of influence. It is the load-bearing part. People do not act on information. They act on information they believe, delivered by a person they believe in. And the hard truth for anyone in a hurry is that you cannot talk your way to being trusted. Trust is accumulated over many conversations, in small deposits, and it can be wiped out in a single withdrawal.

A framework: the trust equation

In their book The Trusted Advisor, David Maister and his co-authors put trust into a deceptively simple equation, and it is the most useful way I know to work on it. Trustworthiness equals credibility plus reliability plus intimacy, all divided by self-orientation. The three things on top, you build up. The one thing on the bottom quietly divides everything by how self-interested you appear to be. What makes the equation so useful is that it turns a vague feeling into four separate dials you can actually adjust. Most people are strong on one or two and completely blind to a third.

The three you build up

Credibility is whether people believe you know what you are talking about. It comes from being right over time, from admitting the edges of what you know rather than bluffing past them, and from never being caught claiming more certainty than you have.

Reliability is simpler and more powerful than it sounds: do you do what you said you would do, by when you said you would do it? Most trust is built not through grand gestures but through a hundred small promises kept, the meeting notes that always arrive, the follow-up that always happens, the thing you said you would check that you actually checked. I have seen careers turn on this one quality. The analyst who is merely competent but always does exactly what they said, by when they said it, ends up more trusted than the genius who dazzles in the room and then goes quiet for two weeks. Reliability compounds in a way that flashes of brilliance never do, because every kept promise makes the next one more believable, until people stop checking whether you will deliver and simply assume it.

The third dial, intimacy, is really about safety: can people be honest around you without it costing them? Can they admit a problem or voice a doubt, knowing you will not use it against them or repeat it in the wrong room? People open up to those who make it safe and guard themselves from everyone else, which means the person who creates safety hears the truth while everyone else hears the polished version.

The one that divides everything: self-orientation

Now, the part that does the most damage and gets the least attention. The moment people sense that you care more about your own win than about the problem, every other quality you have stops counting. You can be credible, reliable, and easy to talk to, and if people feel you are in it for yourself, they quietly discount all of it. I once worked alongside someone who turned every conversation, however small, toward their own visibility. They were genuinely capable, but you could feel the angle in everything they said, and over time, people stopped trusting even their good ideas, because nobody could tell where the idea ended and the self-promotion began.

This is why the people who push hardest for their own agenda so often fail to move anyone. Their wanting is visible, and visible wanting makes people defensive. The communicators who actually move decisions care more about getting the right answer than about being the one who is right. When you say "that is a fair point, maybe I am wrong," or recommend the option that is better for the organisation even when it is worse for you, people notice, and your influence goes up rather than down. The fastest way to be trusted is to genuinely deserve it, and the fastest way to deserve it is to want the right outcome more than the credit.

Trust is slow, and that is the point

There is no shortcut, and the lack of one is exactly what makes trust valuable. Stephen Covey offered a picture that makes the mechanics concrete: the emotional bank account. Every reliable, honest, considerate act is a deposit. Every broken promise, sharp word, or self-serving move is a withdrawal. The catch, and everyone has felt this, is that deposits are small and withdrawals are large. It takes many kept promises to build a balance and a single betrayal to overdraw it. That asymmetry is not unfair. It is the thing that makes a healthy balance mean something, because if trust could be topped up quickly, it could be faked quickly, and then it would be worth nothing at all.

How to build trust with a new stakeholder

When you are starting from zero with someone, you do not wait for trust to appear. You make deliberate deposits in roughly this order.

In the first weeks, make small promises and keep them visibly. Deliver the notes, the follow-up, the thing you said you would check. You are proving reliability before anyone asked you to.
Admit the edges of what you know early. The first "I do not know, let me find out," followed by actually returning with the answer, does more for your credibility than a month of sounding clever.
Show you can hold confidence. The first time someone shares something sensitive, and it does not travel, you have earned the kind of access most people never get.
Prove you are not only in it for yourself. Recommend the thing that is right for them, even when it costs you. One visible act of that kind is worth a hundred claims of good intent.

The mistakes that drain trust

Trust leaks out through a small number of habits, and the damage is rarely dramatic enough to notice in the moment. Guard against these.

Over-promising to please. Saying yes in the moment and missing later costs far more than a clear, early no would have.
Bluffing. One confident wrong answer is expensive. Two, and people quietly stop believing you, often without telling you why.
Inconsistency, saying different things to different people. The moment two of them compare notes, the balance is gone.
Criticising the absent. Running down people who are not in the room teaches everyone present that you will do exactly the same to them.

Why this is the part nobody can take from you

Trust is the most portable thing you will ever build. It does not show up on the org chart, and it does not depend on your title, which means it cannot be reorganised away or handed to someone else. It travels with you between roles, teams and companies because it lives in the people who have learned, over time, that you are worth believing. Tomorrow we bring clarity and trust together and point them at a specific target: the decision you need to move when you cannot make it yourself.

Go out and be successful.

Oluwatosin Ogunkoya | Flotog BA Insights | www.flotogbainsights.com

Tomorrow: The Meeting Is Won Before It Starts

How to move a decision you cannot make, when the room could go either way.