You’ve Been Promoted, Now What? 5 Secrets To Gain Trust In 90 Days

Be more eager to build trust than you are to earn authority

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“Congratulations on your promotion!” The emotions evoked by those words last mere minutes.

After you’ve announced your promotion on LinkedIn and you’ve celebrated your newfound success, then comes that awful feeling that you might not be as capable as your employer thought you would be. That feeling of incompetence.

So, what do most managers do?

They rush to prove themselves too quickly in the first two-to-three months. And in the rush to prove themselves, they default to command-and-control and authority tactics rather than building relationships, acknowledging what they don’t know, being vulnerable, and building and establishing trust.

As a new manager, this is very easy to do. I’ve seen it happen plenty of times as I’ve coached and consulted managers and leaders. I’ve even been guilty of doing this myself. But here’s one thing I’ve learned.

The best way to establish a strong foundation as a newly promoted or newly hired manager or leader is to work on the most important element of all–trust.

Why? Because it’s the one thing that has a direct impact on you and your team’s performance, which directly translates to your company’s bottom line.

A lot of mistakes can be prevented within the first 90 days of your role if you learn how to establish this critical element of trust. And it’s not hard to do.

Leadership Qualities That Build Trust As A New Manager

Here are the five things my manager taught me when I was first promoted, which enabled me to quickly earn the trust and respect of my team and senior-level stakeholders and propel my team to high performance. These actions made us the number one highest performing team within our region for six consecutive months on our company’s leaderboard.

1. Listening Longer Than It Feels Comfortable

Your first instinct, naturally, is to jump in with ideas, solutions, new ways of working, policies, frameworks, etc. My challenge to you today is to stop.

Instead of diagnosing too quickly or imposing new ways of working, start with asking before acting.

• Understand what your team’s goals and constraints are.
• Understand what stakeholders actually want.
• Ask questions to understand the business model, where the problems lie, what the challenges are, and any bottlenecks and processes that could be outdated.
• Understand what motivates your team and what demotivates them.

Simply put, figure out what’s working and what’s not working by asking genuine, curious questions. When people feel understood, they’re more likely to speak up and to buy into your ideas.

2. Asking Before You Solve

Even when you think you’ve found the answer, don’t default to telling everyone what the solution is. Replace your answer with more questions. This follows the GROW model of coaching, where O in the GROW model is “options.”

To discover the options, you can ask questions like:

• What would success look like here?
• Where do we see ourselves in six months from now?
• Where do we see ourselves by the end of this quarter?
• What would you like to achieve for your personal performance this month?
• What have we tried?
• What have others tried?
• What would XYZ (the wisest person hypothetically) do?
• What else?

You don’t need to have the best answers. You build trust by empowering your team to think for themselves and by extracting the best thinking, even from the silent ones in the room.

3. Making Your Expectations Clear

One of the things that I tripped up on as a leader was assuming that standards were understood because they seemed obvious to me.

Then, when things went wrong when I would take time off on PTO, I was confused. I realized it was because my team were not clear on what the standards were. Even though they had already been told before, it was my job to reiterate those standards frequently and to clarify what success would look like.

Being clear on expectations helps you because your team has a definite path to work on and move forward. And it also helps them by giving them a fair shot at success instead of receiving a shocking annual performance review that tells them that they’ve failed in their performance all year, which is unreasonable because they never knew they were doing it wrong in the first place.

Clarifying expectations and standards ensures that your team members can grade themselves against that standard and know exactly where they stand without any surprises.

More importantly, don’t just set standards; explain why they matter. Tie them to an overall vision, something that the whole team can stand behind.

This is how you gain consensus.

4. Praising In Public, Coaching In Private

If you were in a team meeting before your promotion to leadership, and your boss pointed out that you were delaying the whole team on a project and told you to improve your time management skills, would you receive this as constructive feedback?

Of course you wouldn’t.

Your defences are raised because you were just embarrassed in front of everyone. None of that would sink in and you’d likely question your manager’s motives.

This is why it’s important to remember the leadership and coaching strategy of criticize/give feedback in private (like your performance reviews), but credit/praise in public.

Public correction may demonstrate authority, but it destroys trust rapidly.

You don’t need to publicly humiliate your team members. Credit your team for their collective efforts, but in your 1:1s or in Slack messages and calls, you can talk through areas where they can improve.

5. Following Through Relentlessly On What You Promise

The fastest way to erode trust is to not keep your promises. You’ve witnessed this with politicians many times, and it destroys your confidence in their leadership. Applying this in the corporate context, saying things like, “I’ll look into it,” but never actually following up on what you’ve looked into or when, or following through on policies, makes you appear unreliable.

It gives the impression that all you’re doing is seeking to pacify your team and shut up their concerns so they don’t continue to voice them, rather than actually addressing the elephant in the room.

You may have good intentions, but if you’re making promises that you can’t actually deliver or follow through on time, trust begins to be eroded.

So:

• Only commit to small things that you can actually fulfil.
• Don’t make grand promises. Better to commit small and over-deliver, surprising your team, than commit to huge promises and under-deliver.
• Revisit your commitments regularly.
• And in the worst case scenario, acknowledge when you can’t deliver, don’t have an answer, or haven’t received any updates.
• Talk through your process and maintain transparency.

Your first 90 days are not about proving that you are worthy of the role. They’re more about proving that people can trust you within it. And trust is earned, not demanded by a title.

Follow these five behaviors and you’ll be way ahead in your leadership career.

Learn how to lead with AI in 2026 in my latest Forbes article on the AI trend: “Human-in-the-lead.”