🏢Work-Life Wednesday: Mastering Credibility at Work

Welcome to Work-Life Wednesday, where we deep-dive into leadership best practices to maximize your growth potential.

Good morning. Anyone can build credibility at work. It requires a mindset of excellence and consistency to demonstrate to coworkers that you are built for more than your current role. Credibility is crucial for establishing trust and effective collaboration. Believe it or not, there are clear steps you can take today to start your journey towards becoming credible.

• Know your audience

• Share your vision

• Showcase your expertise

• Engage your community

• Embrace your personality

• Adapt to change

Share your vision.

Sharing your vision is one of the hardest actions on this list because it requires a deep understanding of your problem, an identified solution, and action items to accomplish the goal.

Once you know the details, the fun begins. You need to sell your vision to shareholders using a story to gain their buy-in. Employ the classic framework: who-what-when-where-how. I still use this structure for my stories to show how the vision aligns with the values, goals, and aspirations of shareholders.

Remember, don’t sell someone a pro-duct, sell them on the pro-blem you can solve.

Know your audience.

I think we’ve all learned to communicate differently with different types of people. When looking for an answer to a problem, there’s people I flatter first with a “hope you’re doing well!” or “congrats on getting married!”, and then there’s specific people I get straight to the point with the question. Everyone has different styles.

Knowing your audience means to know who you’re speaking to, what they want to know, and how they prefer to receive information. Understanding cultural, generational, and professional differences is key.

Everyone has a different life experience that formulate biases. Understanding those life experiences will help you to better understand the biases and how to communicate to solve their problems.

Showcase your expertise.

SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) assemble. It’s your time to shine and show how well-informed and up-to-date you are about trends, challenges, and opportunities that are currently affecting your business and customers. Gather your data-points to present them with confidence and logic to drive innovation for your business.

Remember, you’re not always going to have solutions to the problem, but you can acknowledge limitations and mistakes to spark the discussion on improving metrics related to your business.

Engage your network.

My personal favorite, engage your network. This piece of gaining credibility has compounding effects. You’ll find that by involving your network, you’ll not only get valuable feedback on your work, but you’ll gain visibility to leaders and coworkers at your company.

The trickle effect of networking is rapid. When you foster an environment of collaboration on your team, it sets the precedent for how work gets completed, and when you’re at the forefront of that initiative, your credibility skyrockets.

Beware, rapid networking leads to busy calendar.

Embrace your personality.

I struggled with embracing my personality for a long time. I got my first corporate job and for some reason decided I needed to act proper and boring, my perception of corporate at the time. It wasn’t until I worked for someone who was so opposite of “corporate” that I finally understood I could be myself and still succeed in the office.

Seriously, he chewed tobacco, and cursed like crazy. Not my style, but proved to me that everyone has their own! By being embracing your personality at work, you show others they can also be successful by being themselves. Set that example and credibility will follow.

Adapt to change.

Adapt to change, then do it again, and again. Embrace change to champion innovation and experimentation. You’ll be seen as the office Swiss Army Knife and people will trust you in any situation.

Be open, curious, and innovative. You’ll find yourself learning new skills as you explore the world of change. This can take months or years as business scenarios change over time, but credibility is sure to follow once you prove yourself to be useful in different environments.

BTW, proving yourself as adaptable is RECESSIONPROOF. When it’s time to cut down on staff, you’re marking yourself as untouchable.

_{Written by Bailey Hepler}