You will gain your team’s trust and respect fast when …

Whether you’re starting a new job or transitioning to a new team, here are a few tips to gain your team’s trust and respect quickly.

1. You're transparent and friendly

Your attitude is key. In software engineering, it’s important to be willing to offer help when needed and jump on blockers to get your team moving. Whether you’re a junior dev or a senior dev, you need to embrace challenges in a collaborative way. Share your findings, share your solution, share your blockers. Document everything and make it available for the future. There’s no such thing as keeping secrets.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Writer

2.  You speak up

Something blocking you? Learn to speak up and raise concerns early. Managers appreciate honesty. Even if you don’t know exactly what the source of the problem is or how to solve it, raising concerns will help people direct you to the right person or resource to unblock you. I’ve seen people finding problems and trying to solve them alone only to realize they’re wasting way too much time when the problem is known and the solution is documented. You need to get to a peaceful place where you put your pride on the side and be ok to ask :)

Check out some advice on how to overcome anxiety in meetings here.

3. You learn when and how to push back

Has anyone tried to make you redo all your work after a code review? Discuss with your team and see what they think. If the code review makes sense and it’s worth re-writing everything to avoid future technical debt then maybe you want to reconsider your design. If it does what it’s supposed to do and could use some minor refactoring, Get your team together with your code reviewer and communicate what can be done to deliver with the least technical debt.

Hope you found those tips inspiring and helpful. Happy coding :)