Borrowed Trust: The Teach-Me / Help-You Play
Accelerate trust in a new org by making its most powerful person accountable for your competence
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 92%
New people are distrusted until they are tested, and organisations usually test people publicly and brutally. Idiodi's counter-move is to attach yourself to the loudest, most influential person in the company and ask them either to teach you or to let you help them. Doing so transfers their existing trust onto you, forces a relationship, and — crucially — makes them personally invested in your competence, because your incompetence would now make them look like a bad teacher.
Origin
Christian Idiodi's own practice as a product leader and SVPG coach; he calls it 'an emotional intelligence black belt technique'. It is his standard onboarding play for both himself and the people he coaches.
Core principles
- 01Trust is mostly a competence judgement, not a likeability one — corporate environments tolerate poor communicators who are excellent at their job.
- 02Nobody trusts you until they test you, and they will test you publicly. Get the testing done privately, on your terms, first.
- 03Influence has a cause: the powerful person is powerful because of some competence. Go learn that competence directly from the source.
- 04The fastest path to trust is to make someone else accountable for an outcome that belongs to you.
- 05Extending someone else's trust is faster than earning your own from scratch.
How to run it
- 1
Identify the real power, not the org chart
Within days of joining, find the loudest, most influential person — the one who is in every meeting, whom everyone believes knows everything. Work out what competence (business, customer, data) is actually driving their influence.
Pro tip Ask a CEO who they trust to make a call on markets or priorities; the name they give is the person you attach to.
- 2
Get permission and make the two-sided offer
Ask your manager for cover, then approach the influential person with one of two asks: teach me, or let me help you. If they say they're too busy to teach, volunteer to do work for them — for example, running interviews or grunt work on their behalf.
Pro tip If you are the manager onboarding someone, make the ask on their behalf: 'I just hired Lenny, he knows nothing about our business — I'd love for you to teach him some things.' Lower the cost by proposing pure observation.
Watch out Framing it as a favour they must invest time in gets a no. Framing it as 'he'll just sit quietly in your meetings for a week' gets a yes.
- 3
Shadow them in public for a sustained block
Clear a week of calendar and sit in their meetings. Being seen walking the halls with them is the point: the org reads you as vouched-for, and it is impossible for them to spend a week beside you without asking about you and introducing you to others.
Pro tip Shadowing also teaches you the political dynamics of the company, not just its facts.
- 4
Let the accountability flip work
Because they taught you, your competence is now their reputation. Two months later they cannot say you know nothing without indicting themselves as a bad teacher — so they will prep you, defend you and coach you instead.
Watch out This only holds if you actually learn. The mechanic buys you goodwill, not a permanent pass.
- 5
Out-learn the teacher
Once they've taught you everything they know, keep doing discovery every single day. Because people saw you learn from the best and saw you keep learning, they will eventually conclude you have more insight and more data than anyone — and trust follows competence.
Pro tip Visible, continuous learning is itself the trust signal — people must see you learning, not just be told about it.
Watch out Stopping after the shadowing week leaves you with borrowed trust and no earned trust; the borrowed kind eventually expires.
In the wild
Idiodi describes taking a new hire to the company's most influential leader, explaining that the new person knows nothing about the business, and asking the leader simply to let them sit quietly in their meetings for a week — 'no stress, nothing to give'. Over that week the leader inevitably starts asking the new hire about themselves, introducing them around, and correcting their early mistakes.
→ The new hire ends the week with the leader's network, the leader's mental model of the business, and a powerful sponsor who is now motivated to defend their competence.
He advises PMs entering a low-trust situation to accept a period of humility, admit what they don't know, and go to the person 'in every meeting who knows everything' with the teach-me-or-let-me-help ask, then keep doing discovery long after the teaching stops.
→ The PM ends up with more customer, business and data insight than anyone else in the room — which is the only durable basis on which an org will let a PM decide what gets built.
Common mistakes
Trying to establish authority before establishing competence
A new PM who asserts they know the customer or the data better than incumbents gets publicly tested and fails, permanently damaging trust. The discipline has to earn the right to make decisions.
Networking without a transaction
Generic coffee chats don't build trust. The play works because it carries an explicit exchange — teach me, or let me help you — that creates obligation and shared accountability.
Letting the test happen in the meeting
If the first time a powerful executive probes you is in a public forum and you get it wrong, you lose trust that takes years to rebuild. Move the testing into a private, low-stakes teaching relationship first.
Is it for you?
Best for
A product manager, leader or consultant in their first 90 days at a company where they have no track record and low institutional trust.
Not ideal for
Environments where the most influential person is actively hostile or politically toxic, or where you already hold deep domain competence and the constraint is authority rather than trust.
From the transcript
“so I I always practically advise product managers in this kind of scenario build relationships with people you end the trust by asking them to…”
“so here's what I do when I want to build trust”
“it's impossible two months from now for that person to say oh Lenny doesn't know anything why because he makes them a bad teacher”
“now what you're doing is you're extending that person's trust to yourself you're also building a relationship with that person but more importantly you're learning…”
“trust is based on competence and character”
From the episode
The essence of product management
Christian Idiodi (SVPG)