Robin Good: If you are looking to become a respected and trusted authority in your niche, here is something important to pay attention to.
Competence and expertise is not the only critical factor.
To trust and support you, your fans must know what you are really after, and unless you make some very conscious efforts to do so, it may be likely that most people are not clear, or outright confused about your true mission.
Linda Hill and Kent Lineback spell very well out the logic behind this while providing you with three key steps you can take now to overcome this issue.
Excerpted from their article intro on HBR: "...our feelings about someone, whether we fear or trust them, are largely determined by their intentions.
By divining what they want, we answer the question we all instinctively ask about someone new: ally or enemy?
Intentions are how we distinguish a villain from someone whose influence we accept, whom we move toward. Competence may be appealing, but intentions are what attract or repel us and foster trust or mistrust.
Thus, if you want to lead and influence others, you must reveal your intentions.
People won't believe you will do the right thing unless they're convinced you genuinely want to do it.
That requires more conscious effort than most bosses understand.
We all more or less assume that others will see our positive motives or at least give us the benefit of the doubt.
But it often doesn't work that way.
As a leader and manager, you must often make tradeoffs among the competing interests of your own group, other groups, the organization as a whole, important outsiders, and the individuals who work for you. That obviously creates many opportunities for people to misinterpret your intentions.
That's why it's often critical to take conscious and purposeful steps to reveal your motives and values and to open yourself so others can see inside you.
Here are three important ways to reveal your intentions and convince others of their sincerity."
Excellent. 9/10
Full article: http://blogs.hbr.org/hill-lineback/2012/04/for-people-to-trust-you-reveal.html