How to Build Trust as a Young Executive in a Legacy Industry
The term legacy industry refers to industries that have been around for a long time and are not easily disrupted by emerging technologies. Examples of legacy industries include healthcare, manufacturing, finance, energy, transportation, and law. These industries are built on longevity, tradition, and a deep-rooted respect for seniority. In such an environment, being a young executive can be quite a challenge. Young age may be mistaken for inexperience within the industry and an innovative approach may be met with skepticism due to a lack of trust. This article focuses on the best ways to build trust as a young executive in these industries.
Table of Contents
How to Build Trust as a Young Executive in a Legacy Industry
Understand the workplace culture
As a young executive and “fresh blood”, you probably have a multitude of ideas for improvements in many departments. Before you even start changing anything, make sure to understand workplace culture first. Workplace culture is a shared set of values, attitudes, goals, and practices that characterize an organization or business.
What’s specific about legacy industries is that they have long-standing systems in place for a reason. The processes may have resulted from hard-learned lessons, cultural expectations, or industry regulations. For that reason, it’s important to spend some time observing the environment and trying to understand why things are the way they are. Instead of imposing changes immediately, it’s wise to listen and learn first. That way, you’ll be confident whether your ideas could work in such an environment or not.
In order to understand the workplace culture, it’s useful to speak to senior leaders, customers, front-line workers, and other team members, depending on the specific legacy industry.
The more you learn, the more you will develop sincere respect for the history of the industry and a specific organization or company. As a result, people will be more open to hearing your ideas and trust you and their colleagues more easily.
Work on your confidence
Self-confidence and self-trust are crucial to trusting others in your workplace. On the flip side, doubting yourself creates fertile ground for mistrust in the decisions and intentions of your team. As a young executive, especially in the legacy industry, it’s easy to feel triggered when others challenge your ideas and provide feedback. At that moment, you may wonder if the team members respect you or not. These thoughts are intrusive and destructive.
Just because other people give feedback, it doesn’t mean they lack respect for you. Receiving input from team members should be encouraged. That’s why it’s important to work on self-trust and confidence. Evidence shows that confidence is a major component of positive leadership, which is necessary for positive affect and engagement among team members.
Overcoming intrusive and destructive thoughts requires inner work and learning to trust yourself. Self-trust and confidence keep your mind open and help you learn to trust others too, which leads to positive relationships with people in your team and increased trust.
Have a mentor
While young executives bring fresh perspectives into the legacy industry, they can still benefit from a mentor. Yes, even as a leader in your workplace, you should still give mentorship a chance. Young professionals with mentors are more likely to succeed in their careers.
Reasons to have a mentor include:
● Transfer of institutional knowledge and industry expertise from seasoned professionals to young colleagues
● Confidence boost
● Helps build leadership qualities such as strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, and effective communication.
Having a mentor is a good way to prepare for the challenges ahead and overcome them successfully. It’s also a good way to build your reputation and earn trust.
Be transparent
As a young executive in a legacy industry, you need to emphasize your commitment to building a positive work environment and supporting your team members. One way to do so is to prioritize transparency about your goals and vision. Transparency and honesty are the building blocks of trust. Team members will recognize and appreciate them. They will trust you more and vice versa. Plus, they will emulate your actions and focus on transparency, which may lead to trust building within the entire team.
Work on communication skills
Communication is essential for any type of relationship between two or more people, even in a professional setting within a legacy industry. Without proper communication, it’s difficult to build and maintain trust as a young executive.
One of the fastest ways to lose trust is through unclear communication or inconsistency of your actions. Make sure to develop a leadership style that is composed, transparent, and tailored to your team members. When addressing your team, strive to avoid jargon and focus on tangible benefits as well as well-defined goals.
When communicating, try to connect your ideas for change to the organization or company’s long-term mission and values. That way, your proposals will be seen as progress, not revolution.
Healthy communication and consistency are important factors for building trust as a young executive.
Avoid favoritism
Young executives are often met with a great deal of skepticism. At that point, it feels natural to lean on team members who are welcoming and with whom you feel most comfortable. However, you should avoid doing so. It’s called favoritism and reduces trust within your team. This behavior makes it difficult for team members to trust you and others because they find it unfair. With the loss of trust, team members also lose motivation, and their productivity may suffer.
Even if others are skeptical and not overly welcoming to a young executive, you should still be fair, and just, and approach everyone with the same level of kindness and desire to work together successfully. Treat everyone with an equal level of respect and show you trust them and they may do the same.
Conclusion
As a young executive, you may often wonder how to build trust in a legacy industry when people can be skeptical and dismissive. In order to build trust, you need to be fair, respectful of workplace culture, and transparent. It also helps to have a mentor, improve communication skills, and trust yourself. The goal is to build trust among team members and ensure they trust you, which is achievable once you employ strategies from this post.
References
https://professional.dce.harvard.edu/blog/how-to-build-and-improve-company-culture/
