Being Smart Got You Here. It Won’t Get You Heard
I was a twenty-something hotshot senior engineer. I had just gotten promoted. I had lots of strong opinions, strongly held. I was unafraid to push back hard at anyone and everyone. But I couldn’t convince anyone to listen to me. I felt exhausted trying to influence people. Every conversation was a battle. I tried everything. I tried to be their friend. I tried sending them the latest tech articles proving my point of view. I tried getting my manager to convince them. Nothing happened. In fact, the more I tried to do what I thought was the right thing, the more resentful and distant the team became. At that point, I was convinced I was doing something wrong.
If you are expecting me to reveal that I had a sudden realization of what the right approach was, you are wrong. Sorry. I figured it out after a decade or so in the industry and with a lot of help from my mentors and managers. If you’re a young tech professional feeling frustrated, tired, and burnt out because all your attempts at doing the right thing for your team and your company are not working out, this post is for you. I will break down five things you need to learn to influence your peers and teams.
Eat some humble pie. Young, driven, smart, and humble don’t always show up together. Specifically, humility is almost always missing. This is especially visible when young folks have some experience and have seen some wins. There is a technical term for this phenomenon: the Dunning-Kruger effect. Early competence produces disproportionate confidence. The less you know about a domain, the less you know about what you don’t know. A senior engineer with three years of experience has learned enough to feel like an expert, but not enough to have been humbled by the full complexity of the problem space. That comes later, usually after a few painful failures. Additionally, if you are under 30, your prefrontal cortex, which manages impulse control, might not be fully developed. Low impulse control combined with disproportionate confidence results in you showing up as an arrogant, entitled, all-knowing ass.
There are no absolutes. What you consider an absolute fact might not be the case in five, ten, or fifteen years. This is especially true in tech. Ten years ago, the rage was microservices. All conversations were some variation of, “Why are you not building microservices? You are dumb not to.” Fast forward to now. Turns out monolithic codebases aren’t so bad. Kickstarter and Kajabi both have monolithic codebases, as do Shopify and Google. The current rage is AI. AI for everything is turning out to be not a great idea. It is great for some use cases (coding, for example) and not so great for others (creative content). My point is, when you are positioning something in front of a person or a team, keep in mind that your conviction might turn out to be wrong. So what is the right approach?
Start with listening. Don’t bring a solution without understanding context and history. Before you say, “You should be using <insert_new_tech> for <a_use_case_you_barely_understand>”, start by understanding the landscape. If asked humbly, most people will be more than willing to spend time with you and share their perspective. When you are talking to folks, just listen. Don’t try to interject your solution. Once you have talked to enough people, fully understood the landscape and history, and internalized your colleagues’ day-to-day reality, take a beat and write down the problems you have noticed. Let that sit with you for a bit. If you have slept on it for at least one night and still woke up energized and enthusiastic about solving it, move on to the next step.
Build consensus. It is extremely hard to get people, teams, and leaders to invest energy into solving a problem that doesn’t have broad agreement behind it.
The right way to build consensus is to start by asking your stakeholders what is top of mind for them. What is keeping them up at night? What are their goals? What problems are they trying to solve today? Lead with that. Don’t start with, “Hey, I think this is a problem, do you agree?” Start with, “What is top of mind for you?” or “What is keeping you up at night?” or “What problems are you focused on right now?” If those problems don’t intersect with what you think needs solving, you are going to have a tough time getting people behind your solution.
If everybody agrees the problem is worth solving, raise your hand to be on the team. If someone else gets picked to lead, don’t throw a fit. Just focus on doing a great job. If you come across as someone who was only pushing to solve a problem for selfish reasons, it will erode a lot of trust. Hit your deadlines. Raise risks before they become risks. And if you mess up, own it. Ask for feedback. Raise your hand for the toughest tasks.
Deliver Results - No one will ever listen to the person who has a ton of opinions but has never delivered anything of value. I have encountered these folks even at seemingly well-run teams, including at Amazon. Super sharp, early-career engineers who have a lot of strong, seemingly intelligent opinions but have never actually delivered anything meaningful.
Before you try to push your team to become better versions of themselves, you need a track record of delivery, so that people around you know that you are not just talk and that you can deliver results. Keep raising your hand to participate in mission-critical, time-constrained projects. Show that you can get stuff done. Show that you can walk the walk, not just talk the talk. Then you can go change the world.
Earn Trust - You can only influence people if you have built a level of mutual trust. So how do you earn someone’s trust in a professional setting? Very simple.
You deliver on your promises.
It’s as simple as that. The easiest way to build trust is to do what you said you would do.
Be vulnerable. This one sounds counterintuitive, especially if you are trying to be taken seriously. But stay with me.
Most young professionals have an answer for everything. They never admit uncertainty. They would rather bluff their way through a conversation than say three simple words: I don’t know. And that performance is exactly what makes the old-timers roll their eyes internally.
Nobody trusts the person who always has an answer. People trust the person who knows when they don’t have one.
When you say “I don’t know,” or “I don’t have experience with this, can you walk me through it,” or “help me understand the history here,” it changes the conversation from, “Hey, I want you to do this for me” to “Hey, I need help” and most professionals will almost always help when someone explicitly asks them for it. That is the moment a professional relationship actually begins.
There is also a reciprocity effect worth understanding. When you admit you don’t know something, you give the other person permission to do the same.
One important boundary, though. Vulnerability in a professional context means intellectual honesty. Admitting gaps in your knowledge, asking for help, and approaching problems with curiosity instead of false confidence. It is not the place to dump all your personal emotional baggage on your co-workers. That can misfire very badly.
None of this is easy. It takes longer than you want it to and requires more patience than feels fair. But it works. And if you don’t want to do any of it, start your own company and build it the right way.
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