One question on the call caught me off guard because I hadn’t fully answered it for myself. An Improver asked: I’d been around Improving people for years before I joined, so what was the biggest surprise once I actually came on board?
It’s a good question, because I wasn’t someone walking into a company I barely knew. I was walking into a group of people I’d been orbiting for a long time. So what caught me off guard wasn’t the people. It was something the company had built that I had no idea existed.
I knew the people before I joined
Let me back up. Leaving my previous employer was a designed move. I’d worked there for eight and a half years, and I knew I needed to go do my own thing for a while, learn different lessons, do some pondering. But as I walked out the door, I told anyone who asked: whenever I go back to working for a company, it will be with Improving.
I wasn’t going to be on the market for anything else. I wanted to work with those people. We were speaking at the same conferences, the same user groups, on similar topics. Same kind of energy, same kind of mindset. The alignment was there before I ever had an employee badge (figuratively speaking; we don’t do badges).
So when I joined, none of that was a surprise. The surprise was the trust.
The trust initiative
Almost as soon as I got there, I started hearing about trust. Everything we have around trust. Trust changes everything. There’s a whole trust initiative, and the company’s stated ambition is to change the perception of the IT professional.
My first reaction was: wait a minute, people don’t trust IT professionals?
That was not an experience I had observed before. And the reason it wasn’t is worth unpacking, because it’s very personal to me.
The only person I trust
Before I joined Improving, I had at least four or five situations where companies and business people came to me asking for guidance, or asking me to consider joining their project. The main thing they said, over and over, was: I trust you.
For a long time I didn’t know what to make of that. Then in 2014, a friend of mine who owns an immigration office in Brazil said something that finally got my attention. He told me he knew I’d been away from Brazil for so long, but in all this IT thing, I was the only person he trusted.
I remember sitting with that. What does that really mean? What is it about IT professionals that makes so many people withhold trust? And what was it about the way I worked that made this one friend, and a handful of others, trust me anyway?
That question has stayed with me ever since.
What breaks trust in IT
When I dug into it, partly through research and partly through paying attention, I found something I didn’t think of before. A lot of business people don’t think of the work I do as IT at all. When they say IT, they picture the people who keep the machines running, not the consultants, not the people who solve problems through building software. They think of IT as the infrastructure behind the business, not as people who understand the business.
I learned that years ago, and it was a genuine surprise. It reframed a lot for me, and it’s part of why I’ve written about earning trust in the business relationship sense. From Cloud to Trust is my take on how trust gets built by design on real projects, one decision at a time. But the trust initiative at Improving is different. It’s not about a single project. It’s a company-level decision to make trust a first-class value, and to build an entire culture around it.
The behaviors I keep seeing
Thinking about it over the years, I’ve noticed a few behaviors that seem to push trust away. The technologist who gets so stuck in the technical concerns that they forget about the people they’re supposed to serve. The one who treats every problem as a reason to show off the latest tool, the newest framework, the shiny thing that’s coming out next week, instead of actually solving the thing in front of them.
Those aren’t behaviors that build trust. They’re behaviors that make a business owner quietly decide to keep IT at arm’s length. And I understand why, even though I don’t love it. If the person in the room can only talk about tools and information, and never about the problem you’re trying to solve, you stop treating them as a partner. You start treating them as a vendor you’d rather not deal with.
I was lucky. I had people in my life who told me, plainly, that I was the one person they trusted. That feedback gave me a reason to figure out what I was doing differently. It was focus on their problem instead of on my toolbox.
Why trust matters to me
The people who told me they trusted me weren’t talking about my code. They were talking about the way I showed up. I didn’t lead with tools and bits and bytes. I led with their problem: what is it you’re actually trying to do, and if we did this thing here, would it make a positive impact on that? That’s the behavior that earns trust, and it’s the behavior the trust initiative is trying to make normal for everyone.
So when I joined and found a whole company trying to change the perspective of the IT professional, it clicked. I had been operating on that instinct alone, one person at a time. Here was a company trying to do it at scale. That was the biggest surprise, and honestly, it was the best one.
I had been carrying a version of this idea around for years without a name for it. I knew the people before I joined, and I trusted them and they trusted me. What I didn’t know was that the company had built trust into the foundation, not just talked about it. Finding that out, a few weeks in, is what made me feel like I’d finally landed somewhere that thought the same way I did.
That reframing mattered more to me than any project or any perk. It told me I hadn’t found a job. I’d found a place that believed the same thing I did: that the work only matters if the people on the other end of it trust you enough to let you help.
So when someone asks me what surprised me most about joining, the answer isn’t the size of the company or the tools or the projects. It’s that the thing I’d been fighting for alone, one person at a time, was already the company’s whole ambition. Trust doesn’t have to be the exception. It can be the standard.
Leave a Reply