How to Use Amazon's Leadership Principle, Earn Trust, to Supercharge Your Career (and Human) Growth

As a lawyer, I found this one was critical since people seem naturally suspicious of attorneys.  I remember being told that the first executive I supported at Amazon didn’t like lawyers.  I took it as a challenge to change his mind.  I found later that he trusted me eventually but still didn’t like lawyers, so goal only partially achieved.

Earn Trust: Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.

For thirteen years, seven leadership roles, in three countries, the Amazon leadership principles guided my professional decisions and as the year progressed, they increasingly often also provided valuable input to my personal life decisions as well as my philanthropic efforts. I shared my insights with those I mentored but as my capacity to mentor was limited, I turned to writing as my one-to-many strategy. This series of posts shares my thoughts on how to apply the Amazon Leadership principles to your career and how to apply them to your roles outside of your work too. This is the 22th post in that series.

Earning Trust is the most important Amazon leadership principle, in my view. Without it, I don’t see a way to succeed, even using all the others.  I debated this with my first manager at Amazon who thought Deliver Results was more important.  I was very curious about how he could hold such a different view from me and asked him why.  What he said surprised me.  He said, "You were hired at Amazon so I trust you are good and will do your job. What I need is from you to Deliver Results, which requires trust and so much more."

What I realized in that moment, was he and I had very different definitions of trust. (Asking people's definitions of core principles is often enlightening.)  My definition of trust had very little to do with job competency, which is what I heard in his answer. My definition of trust was much deeper.  I saw trust as: I trust you as another human to have my back, I trust you to tell me the truth kindly, even if it costs you, I trust that we are in this together. I realized over the subsequent years that both types of trust are important. But the human level (versus job level) trust is much more challenging to consistently earn.

Earning trust is hard and losing trust is easy as Jeff Bezos has said more than once when discussing customer trust.  I think this applies equally to trust with colleagues and others in your life. I like the language in this principle about bring vocally self-critical. I know I am self-critical, and I am guessing most leaders are too. The vocally self-critical part is where most leaders trip up with this principle.  Calling out your team is hard but calling out yourself, publicly, REALLY doesn’t come easy. There is risk and likely a cost to doing do.

However, ultimately, as a leader, everything your team does is your responsibility and building trust requires you apply this principle in its entirety, not just the parts that are easier.  I coach a fair number of Amazonians and former colleagues in various capacities.  When I get asked how to build trust quickly, most find the answer hard to implement.  I advise them to tell their team and others what they are not good at, where they have failed or are struggling and ask for assistance and support.  In other words, be vulnerable.  I know this advice might not work for every environment since it requires a level of psychological safety that isn't always present

But if you can do so, it definitely builds trust quickly and helps the team get more psychological safety by role modeling what is needed.  It also has the added benefit of taking the pression off of being perfect.  In my later career, I started to regularly share what was hard for me with my teams and colleagues. I would also ask them to give me feedback if my struggles were negatively impacting them as well as real time feedback to help improve.

Here are a couple examples that still make me uncomfortable sharing publicly. I am very time challenged. I have no sense of it so I find it tough to make it to things on time and can miss deadlines, meetings or calls. I have developed a lot of tools to help but it is still a struggle. Another example is, when I ideate or get excited about something, I often use too many words and jump around so it is hard to follow what I am saying. I might also interrupt (others or myself) or talk too long as I am processing. Again, I worked hard to improve in these areas, but even with consistent focus and practice, I can fall short. I found sharing these specifics helped team members and colleagues understand what to expect from me, be more able to assume positive intent (an important daily practice) and helped me feel less bad about not being perfect, although I still working on the last bit. It also gave them permission to give me feedback, as I requested it specifically, and also to share what they were struggling with and need support on from me or other team members.

I found other leaders had their own unique way of messaging that earned trust.  I remember hearing one long time senior leader at Amazon saying, “Here is my idea.  I am sure there are things I am missing or got wrong. I want to know about those.” This encouraged an open discussion and showed the team a leader who didn't assume s/he has all the answers. I was impressed when Andy Jassy, who was then leading AWS, came to share his experiences as part of leadership training at Amazon.  He shared a huge failure and what he learned from it.  He was humble and sincere.  I found his role modeling of vocally self-critical impressed me more than the achievements I saw touted publicly.

Earning trust is an everyday activity.  I need to show up authentically, own my mistakes, apologize when I need to (and trust me we all need to more than we think), give credit and affirmation more than seems required (and it will still be less than what is needed). 

Any finally, some of the progress we make here will highlight how much we missed earlier in our lives which can cause unhelpful rumination, maybe this happens just for me, but I doubt it. I like to remind myself of Maya Angelou's advice: "Do the best you can and when you know better, do better!

Please share the ways you have learned to earn trust! It's a critical human skill and we call all learn from each other and improve.

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I write more on my personal blogs: Balancing Motherhood and Career and Ethiopian Ties as well as Adoptive Families Circle, Melting Pot Family