How to become a teammate people trust
Ren Iris
Recently, our early career engineer program (a hands-on apprenticeship) saw its first graduate, Rue. During her final formal review with the Mighty Acorn Digital mentorship team, Rue asked a question that sparked a variety of answers.
“How do I become someone people want on their team not only because I’m ‘nice’ to work with, but also because I am trustworthy and have the skills?”
The team’s responses offered practical ways to build trust over time. Rue’s apprenticeship also gave her opportunities to put those ideas into practice: communicating early, taking ownership, asking thoughtful questions, and connecting technical decisions to the people a service is meant to help.
Provide and ask for visibility
Visibility and reliability form the foundation of professional trust. Make yourself visible to stakeholders and collaborators, and be reliable by doing what you say you will do. If you cannot deliver on a commitment, communicate that early rather than disappearing. Speaking up and asking for help also builds trust, as does being open and honest about your abilities. Even if you “make a mess,” navigating out of it successfully increases trust in your skills, which reinforces the value of asking for help when problems arise.
Putting this idea into practice
Rue is working on a project with a state government agency now, building design system components—currently she’s working on a pagination component. Some aspects aren’t passing accessibility standards, so Rue has been asking follow-up questions and doing supporting research to understand priorities and the best approach for resolving issues. For example, in the pull requests, she has noted that there are accessibility risks, such as issues with low color contrast. Rue met with Mighty Acorn team leads and accessibility experts in the interim. Her early flagging these risks prompted the team lead to set up a meeting with the stakeholders who have provided the specifications and prioritization.
Remain independent while staying engaged with your team
Independence and judgment are closely related. Tackle tasks on your own and communicate with stakeholders without needing to be constantly steered; avoid overpromising, overcommitting, or acting on an assumption, which may require external correction. Recognize that while there’s an infinite amount of work to do, you know your capacity and limitations best. Avoid taking on more than you can handle. When participating in a project or when handling a task isn’t feasible, say no. Gently but firmly push back when people ask to add more to your workload. By not overpromising, you can help protect your team and project commitments.
Putting this idea into practice
Rue wrote the code and logic for our donut-inspired Slack bot, Acornnection. Mighty Acorn wanted to integrate a donut bot into Slack to generate coffee chats that strengthened interdepartmental connections. We considered paying for the donut product, but it was too expensive to just play around with. Rue offered to write her own version for us instead, suggesting it would be a cool skills-building project. The team agreed, and Rue impressed us by debuting the bot during an all-hands meeting.
Additionally, the bot needed to be hosted in AWS. Although it would be her first time working with Terraform, Rue volunteered to take on this task, too. She wrote infrastructure as code to create a maintainable revision path, seeking maintainability knowing that other engineers would also need to work on the bot.
Josh, a software engineer at Mighty Acorn, later reported Rue’s success on Slack.
“Y’all, I am happy to report that Rue has successfully deployed her Acornnection app to AWS using Terraform! This was a bunch of totally new technologies for her, and she successfully created:
- CI / CD pipelines to build and push Docker images
- A Dockerfile to go with the above
- Terraform to build and deploy the infrastructure
“She consistently showed tenacity and drive to go get this done, through failed pipelines and nagging IAM permissions. There’s more work to be done before it can be added to the main company Slack, but I wanted to give her a big shout-out on a successful deployment!”
Balance technical work with product outcomes
Most users don’t care about the code itself. Balance writing clean code with accomplishing tasks and making products usable. Maintain professionalism and calmness even when there’s interpersonal conflict—productive collaboration under tension is essential.
Putting this idea into practice
Writing code from scratch isn’t always the best answer for a given situation. It may feel productive, but your priority is to deliver specified product outcomes. One requested website change inadvertently resulted in removing the descriptive tagline for Mighty Acorn. Rue spotted the error, realized through searching the site that it was the only instance, and flagged that because our tagline is the only place we explain our namesake. She built the component; thanks to her, our About us page explains that “A 100 foot oak tree starts with a Mighty Acorn.” Rue and I both agree that this was a critical fix for user clarity. Thanks, Rue!
Updated on August 26, 2026.