How to Build Trust at Work, and How to Rebuild It After a Mistake

You build trust at work by giving people repeated evidence that they can rely on you: doing what you said you would do, telling the truth when it is awkward, showing that their interests matter to you, and handling your mistakes in the open. Trust is not something you create with charm. It is a conclusion colleagues reach from what you consistently do.

That is good news whether you are new and still unproven or quietly worried that a missed deadline has cost you some standing. The behaviors that earn trust are specific, and every one of them can be practiced. The answers below cover what colleagues actually weigh, how long it takes, and how to recover when you slip — and why the smallest promises you make end up carrying the most weight.

What makes people trust someone at work?

Three things, weighed mostly without anyone saying so out loud. A Maynooth University research spotlight on workplace trust sums up the characteristics people use to judge whether someone is trustworthy: ability, benevolence and integrity. Each answers a different silent question a colleague is asking about you.

Ability asks whether you can actually do the work you have taken on. Benevolence asks whether you have their interests at heart, or only your own. Integrity asks whether you are honest, fair and respectful, including when nobody is checking. Strength in one does not make up for a gap in another: a brilliant colleague who shades the truth does not get trusted, and neither does a kind one who never delivers.

That is useful early in a career, because it turns a vague hope — that people will come to trust you eventually — into three things you can show on purpose. Most of the answers below are about how.

How do I get my coworkers to trust me at a new job?

Start small, and keep every promise you make. People trust colleagues whose words and actions line up, and when you are new, the small commitments — “I’ll send that over by Thursday,” “let me check and come back to you” — are the first evidence anyone has. Keep them, and colleagues learn that your word means something. Let even minor ones slide, and they learn to discount what you promise, usually without ever mentioning it.

That makes reliability as much about what you agree to as about what you deliver. The pull to prove yourself by saying yes to everything works against you here, because a yes you cannot keep costs more than a no you never said. If that pull feels familiar, you are in good company. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work told us:

Don’t be in too much of a hurry — you don’t have to be able to do everything from the start. Don’t try to be the hero. It’s great if you dare to throw yourself into things, but you also have to dare to own your limits. Don’t take on tasks you’re not equipped for, only to end up not solving them well and beating yourself up for saying yes to something you weren’t ready for. That just gets you off to a bad start.

She is not arguing against stretch work; throwing yourself in is part of her advice. The point is to be honest about what you are taking on, so you can say “yes, and I’ll need help with this part” instead of promising more than you can deliver. Owning your limits is easier when you know where they are, and a quick, honest skills check shows you before the promises start piling up.

Two other habits speed things up. First, listen and learn before you push for changes. People extend trust more readily to someone who has first listened to them and understood how things work, and asking why something is done a certain way signals respect for your colleagues’ experience before you ask them to rely on yours. Second, show that you are on their side. The same Maynooth research describes benevolence as coming through in small acts: asking a colleague how they are coping with their workload, offering a hand or simply a kind word when they are struggling. When you are focused on proving yourself, this is the easiest part to neglect — and it is what tells colleagues you are more than merely competent.

How do I get my boss to trust me more?

Make your work visible, and be honest about it. Your manager rarely watches your work as it happens, so their confidence in you rests largely on what you show them along the way. The Maynooth research points to progress updates that highlight the decisions you have taken and the outcomes you have achieved as a direct way to demonstrate ability. In practice, that means a short note at each milestone — what is done, what you decided and why, what comes next — so your manager can trust that the work is on track without having to check.

Honesty carries the rest. Tell your manager early when something is slipping, rather than hoping to fix it quietly; a problem raised in time, ideally with a suggestion for solving it, builds more trust than a surprise at the deadline. And agree up front on what a good result looks like, so the commitments you keep are the ones that actually matter to them.

How long does it take to build trust at work?

Longer than it takes to lose it. Trust builds over months of consistent behavior, one kept commitment at a time, while a single broken promise or dishonest moment can damage it quickly. There is no shortcut that skips the track record — but the clock starts with the first small promise you keep, which means it is already running from your first week.

Consistency matters more than intensity. A steady run of ordinary, reliable weeks gives colleagues far more to go on than one heroic push followed by silence, because trust is a judgment about what you will do next time, and only a pattern can answer that.

What destroys trust in the workplace?

Mostly small things, repeated. The quietest is the broken minor commitment: the promised follow-up that never arrives, the deadline that slips without a word. Close behind are failures of integrity — bending the truth, covering up a mistake instead of owning it, or taking credit for work the team did together.

Talking about colleagues behind their backs, or passing on something told to you in confidence, does particular damage, because everyone who hears it starts to wonder what you say about them. And a purely task-focused approach can wear trust down without any single bad act: a colleague who delivers but shows no interest in the people around them gives others no evidence of good intent. Every one of these is a behavior, which means every one of them can be changed.

How do you rebuild trust after a mistake at work?

Own it quickly and fully. In the same Maynooth research, integrity includes three moves after a mistake: admitting it, accepting how it affected other people’s work, and taking steps to put it right. Admitting fault is itself evidence of integrity, which is why a mistake handled well does not have to cost you trust — it can show exactly the honesty colleagues were hoping to see.

In practice, tell the people affected before they find out on their own, name the impact without minimizing it, and come with a fix or a plan. Then keep your next few commitments with extra care. Rebuilding happens through telling the truth and keeping your word afterward, not through a longer apology, and trust can nearly always be rebuilt this way — often faster than people fear. The repair is within your control.

Is trust at work a two-way thing?

Yes. Most working relationships depend on both people trusting each other, so trust is something you give as well as earn. A colleague who senses that you do not trust them — who sees you re-checking their work or holding back information — has little reason to extend trust in return. Extending reasonable trust first, sharing what you know, and forgiving a colleague’s honest slip the way you would want yours forgiven all make trust easier to build in both directions.

The skills behind being someone people rely on

Look back across these answers and the same few behaviors keep resurfacing, whether the other person is a teammate, a manager or a colleague you barely know: keeping your word, being honest about what you can deliver, making your work visible, being on other people’s side. None of them is a personality trait, and all of them are things people get noticeably better at.

Teamwork is where most everyday trust is earned or lost. The framework treats trust in a team as the product of being sincere — meaning what you say and doing what you talk about — being reliable in what you commit to, being authentic, and forgiving colleagues when they fall short. Sharing knowledge freely and giving the team the credit add to it quietly. None of it asks you to be the most popular person in the room.

Influence is what that trust grows into over time. A well-earned reputation comes from delivering results consistently, acting with integrity and being straight-talking rather than political, and once colleagues trust your track record, your ideas get a genuine hearing. Early in a career, the job is earning that credibility, not spending it.

Working with Your Manager matters because your manager’s trust largely decides how much responsibility and freedom you are given. The behaviors that earn it are practical: get the basics right, deliver your part, stay honest even when it is uncomfortable, bring solutions along with problems, and make your results visible. Regular one-on-ones are where that trust gets confirmed — as a partnership, not a verdict handed down.

Knowing which of the three already comes naturally to you, and which needs work, tells you where your effort will pay off — and whichever it turns out to be, it can be learned. The free Job Skills Test looks at all three as part of a wider set of twelve work skills, so you can see which needs practice first rather than guessing.

Some of this may already describe how you work: the quick update you send when a task is done, the colleague you checked in on when they looked swamped. If you have ever told your manager about a slipping deadline before it turned into a surprise, you have already done one of the harder things trust asks for. What remains is turning moments like that into habits, in your own way and without becoming someone you are not. Trust tends to carry more weight as more people come to depend on what you promise, which makes the months when the stakes are still modest a good time to build it deliberately — and a clear view of where you stand is the natural place to begin.

See where your trust-building skills stand

The only step left is finding out where you are starting from. The free Job Skills Test is a short self-assessment of your work skills: it shows how you score across all twelve — including teamwork, influence and working with your manager — and which ones would make the biggest difference to how much people rely on you. It takes about 7 minutes.

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