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As assistants, we know that our job comes down to two main areas.
The first: Can you be trusted to be the closest person your entrepreneur has in their business?
The second: Can you care about your entrepreneur, their well-being, and their vision for the future?
That trust is often intimidating because it is incredibly difficult to build and easy to “break”.
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But trust isn’t like a plate that can be broken and never repaired. A successful working relationship with your entrepreneur has a trust bank.
Think of the trust bank like a piggy bank. You can’t take money out of an empty piggy bank, so you have to be intentional about depositing more than you withdraw. Some withdrawals cost more than others, but, before making another withdrawal, it is important to deposit money to replace the money used.
When you think of what damages trust in the relationship between you and your Entrepreneur, it’s important to think of things from their perspective. To us, something might be a correctable mistake and not a big deal. To them, it could be a source of stress and a very clear withdrawal from the trust bank.
Examples of common withdrawals we see are things like:
Everyone is different, so what the withdrawals are in your and your Entrepreneur’s relationship will be something that you watch for and learn over time. Remember to watch with your Entrepreneur’s perspective in mind. Oftentimes, your Entrepreneur delegates responsibilities that used to be theirs. Fumbling those responsibilities creates a challenging question of why the responsibility was delegated, so we want to be cognizant of how we recover from those withdrawals.
Deposits are typically actions that you don’t think about as much. Actions like the ones listed below build trust with your Entrepreneur, a deposit in your trust bank. It is important to build a solid amount of deposits in your trust bank when beginning your relationship with your Entrepreneur, because this is a part of how you build the foundation for your working relationship. Just because you have built a good foundation does not mean you should stop making deposits into your trust bank as your relationship with your Entrepreneur continues to grow. By continuing to make deposits you will grow a good partnership into a rock-solid one.