As a product manager, how to establish credibility and trust in people around you?

I'm assuming you mean how do you get other people to trust you and believe you are credible? Here's my list! (Can people tell I think in bullets?) 

• Care. It sounds dumb, but would you trust someone who you didn't think cared about you as a person? I don't. Ways to demonstrate this include: taking time to ask questions to get to know someone, following up on small things they've mentioned (their birthday! a thing about their weekend, etc.), or listening when they seem troubled about something. 
• Support your team. Part of trust is knowing that when you need someone to be there, they will be. In a product context, this can mean pushing back on timelines you think are unreasonable for your team to deliver on, helping someone out when they need a second pair of eyes, or shouting out someone for a job well done in a public forum. 
• Follow through on what you say you will do. Nothing erodes trust like feeling you can't rely on someone. 
• If you can't follow through, be really upfront and let others know that. Sometimes work gets crazy and you just can't do everything you said you would do. While it's not ideal, it happens. In this case, people will appreciate if you flag it early so their expectations can be reset. 
• Admit when you don't know something or when you're wrong. This might sound counter-intuitive to building credibility, but I find doing this shows you're both self aware and humble enough to admit you're not perfect. 
• Be vulnerable. Trust is a two-way street. Unless it's your therapist, it feels weird to share a lot of yourself without getting anything back from the other person. Be willing to share parts of yourself (within reason, in a work context). 
• Say the hard thing. This is really really hard to do, especially if you are in unsafe environments or toxic cultures. If you are in a safe environment, saying hard things is incredibly valuable. What do I mean by this? Be willing to voice the contrarian opinion, if you believe it will serve better outcomes. My proxy for this is "What gives me a ton of anxiety? I'm going to voice that." Examples of this I've encountered: 
• I think our culture is lacking innovation because our OKRs are too metrics-focused. 
• I think we need to push out a timeline b/c our entire team will burn out otherwise.
• Is what we're doing ethically wrong? If not, are we doing wrong by the customer? 
• While I love this outcome, I am concerned about the way in which we achieved it. 
• Are we doing something because an executive said it or because we believe it's important for the business to do so? 
• We keep saying X is a priority, and yet there are no resources / we keep putting it behind these 3 other things. Do we need to re-evaluate our priorities? 

Hope this helps! 

The simple answer is to do what you say you’re going to to do. It sounds simple, but it’s not always easy to achieve. When you make good on your commitments over a long period of time, you gain a deep trust from those around you. On the contrary, when you say you’re going to do something and don’t do it, you begin to erode the trust of those around you. Again, it sounds simple but it’s not easy to do this over a long time with lots of diverse stakeholders. I find that when I don’t do this well, it’s usually because I’ve over-committed myself, so be mindful of the commitments your making!

Watch the video response on Loom, or reac the transcript below:

I've received this question about how to earn the trust of a team many times, usually from folks who are taking over in a product role from an existing PM, maybe it's a new team that's being spun out. And the question is always the same. "I need the team to trust me. I want the team to trust me. How do I build trust with this team". And just as the question is often the same, the answer is the same; no matter what team it is, I always give it the same answer.

It's incredibly simple, but not easy. 

First, you have to show up. You have to be there when the team needs you, you have to be there to answer your team's questions. You need to be reliable. And this doesn't mean, you know, co-location or even co-temporality. As we have distributed work across time zones, sometimes it's not possible to be online at the same time, but you need to be responsive. And the team needs to feel like you care about the team, and the team's work, and the teams product, and that you're not simply there to build up your own portfolio or identity or to be managing up or managing laterally. You need to be there for the team, and you need to be prioritizing the team, and the work of the team. 

Two is to be humble. And this manifests most often in admitting what you don't know, and then finding out the answer. So, especially when you're new, but really at any point, asking the team for their opinions, for their insights, recognizing that you don't know all the answers and that even when you have a strong opinion and maybe even a point of disagreement or contention with the team, seek out their viewpoint, try to understand why they have a different viewpoint, examine your own perspective and see if maybe your opinion isn't as solid as you thought it was. Always ask yourself how you can be learning more from the team, and then bring those learnings back to the team.

And finally, you have to serve the team. And this gets back to the first two. Inevitably, there's going to be a challenge. There is going to be a tight deadline. There is going to be an outage or an incident. There's going to be a product that launches and it just doesn't work. And in those situations, you really need to be there to back up the team and support them and make sure that they feel like you're with them in whatever hard situation they're facing. 

There's nothing artificial you can do to build trust. Trust takes time. It takes presence and it takes an open mindset. You just need to recognize that and dig in for the long haul.

I strongly believe that you need to be 'A' level in your core skills - vision, sequencing, and execution. For leaders, the skillset extends to coaching their teams to be 'A' level in the game.

When you do that consistently, people develop trust in you.

There is no shortcut to gaining credibility in my opinion.

This answer is most often sought by PMs looking to jump to the next career level

Trust is earned. So if you as an PM want to establish yourself as a go-to, reliable person for your manager/stakeholder. You'll have to consistently demonstrate the skills sought in you. 

Establishing trust can also be sought by projjecting yourself as a Subject Matter Expert and going out of your way to tackle the most difficult problems within your org