Want to earn the trust of your boss and peers? Sucking up to them won’t do the trick, says Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
“They sometimes confuse it with meaning being nice to one another or having social cohesion or not challenging each other in meetings,” the 58-year-old Amazon veteran said in a company YouTube video: “‘I won’t challenge you if you don’t challenge me’ or ‘This person isn’t trustworthy because they challenged me in a group of people.’” It’s a skill, he says, that people often get “wrong.”
Out of all of the tech giant’s 16 leadership principles penned by its founder, Jeff Bezos, having a foundation of trust between leaders and staff is key to psychological safety, effective collaboration, and innovation. It’s also the culture that has just helped Amazon overtake Walmart on revenue, positioning it to rank No. 1 on the next Fortune 500 list for the first time in 13 years.
It’s why trust starts with being genuine—even if that means serving your boss some hard truths or owning up to your own mistakes.
“What we mean by ‘earn trust’ is being honest, authentic, straightforward; listening intently, but challenging respectfully if you disagree,” Jassy said.
“If you think we’re doing something wrong for customers of the business, speak up,” he added. “If you own something, and it’s not going well, own it.”
And it’s a two-way street: Leaders who want to gain the trust of their team should get comfortable with being “vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing,” Jassy insisted.
But beware of being all talk
Speaking up in meetings is crucial for earning trust, but Jassy notes that it’s not enough on its own. You’ve got to back up your words with action and data to really make them count.
“If you say you’ve got something, deliver it,” he said. “If you think we’re not as good as we’re saying we are, benchmark it, use data, and show us that we’re not as good, and vice versa.”
Jassy shared an example from his days leading Amazon’s marketing team in the early 2000s.
While he was presenting a 220-slide PowerPoint on the team’s operating plan to Bezos and other execs, Bezos interrupted him just 10 slides in and said, “All of your numbers are wrong on this slide.”
“I was taken aback,” Jassy recalled, before adding that he quickly realized the Amazon founder was, in fact, correct.
Instead of being “resentful or mad at Jeff for pointing that out,” Jassy said, he used that moment to hold his hands up, show accountability, and earn his boss’s trust.
It clearly worked: Bezos eventually promoted Jassy to be one of his top advisors, before naming Jassy to succeed him as CEO in 2020.
“I earned trust by owning it, being vocally self-critical, and actually getting better and improving it and providing a much better presentation and account for what was truth the next time I presented in a much broader group,” the CEO concluded.
Is there such a thing as being too authentic at work?
It’s not just Jassy who champions on-the-job authenticity. Jeroen Temmerman, CEO of hair-tech giant GHD, echoed to Fortune that it’s crucial to bagging a top job like his.
“As a leader, you need to talk to people that are in the same kind of situations that you are in—not with a double agenda—just like, ‘How did you solve that problem? Because I have this problem,’” he said.
But as CEOs and experts tell Fortune, bringing too much of yourself to work can backfire.
“As long as you’re at work, your authenticity doesn’t need to be on full blast,” says Tanya Slyvkin, CEO of Whitepage, a presentation consultancy.
She says showing too much of your bubbly personality can signal that you can’t handle difficult decisions—especially if you’re in a leadership role.
“Imagine if I decided to get all goofy and playful at work,” Slyvkin adds. “High chances are, people wouldn’t take me seriously.”
“Any attempt to be 100% your authentic self at all times is a dangerous idea,” agrees James Dale, CEO at SINE Digital, a performance marketing agency.
“You have to study your own personality and work out what to bring and what not to bring to a role based on the personalities of the people that you will be interacting with, both colleagues and clients,” he advises.
Ultimately, humans are multifaceted, and chances are there are aspects of your personality that you can adapt to your environment. For example, if you’re trying to pitch a new-age meat alternative, declaring how much you love the real deal probably won’t do you any favors.
It’s why Katleen De Stobbeleir, professor of leadership at the prestigious Vlerick Business School in Belgium, says it’s important to make the distinction between being authentic versus simply expressing your emotions or opinions.
“Reacting impulsively, such as shouting because a comment upsets you isn’t necessarily authentic,” she says, adding that people who act like that at work may appear untrustworthy and unpredictable.
“In reality, authenticity involves self-awareness of your values, inner feelings, and personality, while also considering the expectations of the context,” she said.
That’s why it’s perfectly normal (or perhaps wise, even) to have various versions of yourself, De Stobbeleir concludes: “Authenticity isn’t about rigidly sticking to ‘who you are’; rather, it’s about genuine self-expression within the context that you find yourself in.
“There’s the you at work; there is the spouse, the parent, friend … and it’s normal that these different yous may not always be consistent.”
A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on July 31, 2024.
