When Authority Isn’t Enough

I remember the first day I walked into that engagement. Everything felt urgent. The client handed me a roster, a charter, and a calendar. There was this extra weight too—the not-quite-said expectation that I’d “fix” the team. We were asked to lead, but nobody said they wanted to follow.

It wasn’t just any group. They called these folks the “problem team.” Before I met them, their reputation was already shaping how everyone talked in the hallways. One manager leaned over—half whisper, half warning—and told me they were lazy, that I should brace for pushback. I’d heard the stories: missed deadlines, minimal ownership, too many sighs at standups.

Authority without the work to build trust in engineering teams is a strange thing. I held the title, sure. I could draft a plan, spotlight blockers, sign off changes. But if you’ve ever tried to steer a group who isn’t bought in, you know. Titles don’t make buy-in. The difference between giving direction and actually moving people is the gap every leader feels—especially when resistance pulses just under the surface. In my head, I knew nothing would genuinely change until trust started to show up in the small daily ways.

Here’s the plain truth: teams mirror what you consistently do. I’ll show you what that looked like, and why it shifted everything.

How Trust Actually Moves Teams

Let’s talk about trust. Not as a buzzword, but how it actually works. Psychological safety gets thrown around a lot, but to build trust in engineering teams, it just means this: people pay close attention to what leaders do over and over. If you routinely explain your decisions, admit your stumbles, back the team in the tough conversations—everyone recalculates the true risk of speaking up. The safer it feels, the more you see real ideas and honest feedback instead of nodding along and hiding problems.

What’s happening under the hood is simple. What you model is what they will mirror. Leaders who focus on service and support over command foster psychological safety and discourage knowledge hoarding, which is exactly what makes modeling so effective, as shown by this servant leadership study. This isn’t just feel-good stuff. It cuts the cycle of guarded communication and disconnect right at the source.

I’ll admit it—I spent years getting this wrong. Six months ago, my instinct was to tighten the reins whenever things slipped. Push for tracking, double down on asks, get louder in meetings. Every time, it backfired. What those teams actually needed wasn’t a drill sergeant—it was someone willing to go first, even when it felt awkward. The moment I chose to lead by example in engineering over dictating, the temperature in the room changed. That’s what taught me to trust the mirror, not just the memo.

You might be thinking: do I really have the bandwidth for all this, or will it just give away my authority? Maybe you doubt whether a sharp group of engineers even care about what you model behind the scenes. I get it. But there’s a practical structure that holds leaders to these habits, and the results show up faster (and stick around longer) than old-school push methods ever did. Let’s get concrete about how that works.

The Weekly Modeling Moves That Build Trust in Engineering Teams

First things first—when you kick off a new week, don’t just hand out tickets and call it a day. Lay out why each priority matters, especially when tradeoffs disrupt routines. If people don’t see the logic behind what you’re asking, getting them to care will always be uphill. A two-sentence rundown—“this customer issue trumps cleanup because uptime dropped last week”—is often enough. The why changes everything.

Then, normalize the fact that none of us nails it every time. I get upfront about what I missed and what I’ll do better next time. Saying “I misjudged that rollout—it bit us in prod, and here’s how I’m changing my approach” lowers the cost of learning for everyone. If you own your own mistakes, they’ll feel safer to take swings too.

Invite the team to speak first. Have them lead off the standup, start design reviews with their concerns, or open retros with what felt sticky. Shifting airtime away from yourself signals that it’s not just okay to question or dissent, it’s expected. Giving people space to go first lowers the perceived risk and models a norm where questions or dissent are safe—the core of psychological safety engineering. If you listen at the front, they’ll listen too.

Stop directing every move. Set the destination, step in vs. step back, but let engineers navigate. “Our goal is to halve response times—what’s your best route there?” Get in problem-solving mode, coaching for outcomes instead of dictating tactics. This shift from micromanaging to developing is when ownership really starts to show up.

Make progress visible, even when the results aren’t fully there yet. It’s awkward at first—I had to stick a note on my monitor that literally said, “catch someone doing it right.” Last sprint, that meant calling out a clever workaround or recognizing patient debugging, not just big launches. The patches of momentum build, even if you’re stuck in the weeds.

Back your team in public, especially when things get messy. If a deploy goes sideways, own the fallout upward so the team knows you’ll absorb some blast radius. Framing mistakes this way means people decide it’s safe to take smart risks, even when the stakes feel high. Back them up when things go wrong—they’ll take more risks.

Leadership follow through isn’t glamorous, but it’s essential. If you say you’ll send the notes by noon or close the ticket this week, follow through, even if it’s a small thing. Keeping your word and following through on even small actions increase how much your team identifies with you and amplify positive group behaviors. After a few cycles, people notice—and trust starts to stick.

Finally, frame feedback as fuel. When you offer a critique, tie it directly to growth—“Next time, capturing those edge cases up front will prevent the rollback” instead of a vague “you missed bugs.” Make feedback about next steps, not judgment. They’ll stay open to it, and the cycle of learning keeps moving.

Making the Modeling Checklist Stick—The Eight-Week Shift

Here’s where it gets real. To actually move trust from “something we talk about” to “how we work,” you need the checklist baked right into your week. That means using the rhythms you already have. In standups, I started opening with a quick why behind the top priorities, then made time for whoever needed to air friction—not just status.

One-on-ones? I’d kick them off by checking if I’d missed something the week before, which nudged the other person to be more candid. In reviews and retros, I worked to make reviews no-surprise and fair by pulling out the checklist—did I frame feedback as fuel, did I own my own scramble, did I invite someone quieter to jump in? It kept me honest. I committed for at least two months—8, sometimes 12 weeks—because real change doesn’t show up after a single sprint. If you care about compounding trust, you’ve got to outlast the early skepticism. I had to choose deliberate over dramatic—quiet habits repeated weekly did more than any single all-hands speech.

To keep myself accountable, I built a simple scorecard. Each behavior became a column: explained the why, owned a mistake, coached vs. directed, recognized progress, followed through, etc. Just a quick binary check per day (did it happen or not?), plus space for a weekly one-minute reflection on what felt awkward or clicked. By the end of the week, I had a handful of checks—or gaps—to tally and spot patterns. Nothing fancy. I literally kept it in the same doc as our sprint goals so it stayed unavoidable.

You’d be surprised how quickly you start to notice trendlines—where you default to old habits, where things start to shift. If you can see the compounding effect, so can your team.

Let’s clear up the biggest objections. Worried it’ll eat too much time? Batch the behaviors—pair your why and feedback loops into the meetings you already have. Scared it’ll erode your authority? It won’t. Clearer standards plus empathy, when you balance empathy with decisive calls, actually make influence stickier.

And if you’re doubting whether engineers on the edge even notice, that’s normal. They will—by testing your consistency first, poking at the edges, then recalibrating once they feel you’re not just talking the talk. You don’t need to be flashy. You need to be repeatable.

You’ll hit rough patches. Some weeks you’ll slip. Progress flattens out, or people seem to revert. I still have no idea if my note-taking hack was actually the cause of more shoutouts, or just made me pay extra attention. Don’t panic—consistency matters more than perfection. The inflection point usually comes slower than you want, but it comes. Slowly, they started to care.

Leadership as Repeated Promise

What finally turned things with that “problem team” wasn’t the role or the authority I’d walked in with. It was showing up consistently, in public, with the behaviors we’d been talking about. Authority is just a promise, and you only earn trust as a leader when people see you keep it out loud—when the team can point to the ways you actually show up. They stopped watching my title and started watching my habits; trust wasn’t granted, it was modeled, and we earned trust by shipping reliably, week in and week out. The shift was slow, but once my actions matched my position, momentum followed—each sprint built more traction than the last.

So here’s what I want you to try. Choose two behaviors from the playbook—maybe it’s explaining the why, maybe it’s backing your team when a deploy goes sideways, maybe it’s framing feedback for growth. Commit to embedding those into your next sprint, and track how often you really follow through over the next quarter. Eight to twelve weeks is enough to see real movement if you go all in.

If you want engineering team trust to be real, you have to go first. Decide to show up before you ask them to.