How to establish credibility and trust in people around you?

See response re: becoming more influential for more details. In addition to those hard skills and tactics, I would say the soft skill side of this is crucial: I establish trust by being authentic, real, vulnerable, delivering on my word, being transparent and taking stakeholders along for the process or journey, sharing my work/team’s work early for feedback, knowing the impact of my team’s work and above all, ensuring our customers are at the forefront of every decision.

From my perspective, there are four absolutely crucial things to establishing credibility and trust; 

1. Act with integrity at all times. This means keeping your word, and doing what you say you will. You must consider fully what it will take to keep that word because if you don't, you end up providing reasons and not results.  
2. Open communication and transparency are key to building trust. The best leaders I've ever worked with demonstrate this trait.
3. Thirdly, if you own a project, take ownership! If you're seen as leading a project well, you will build respect and credibility.
4. Finally, know your business. As a demand gen marketer, you need to understand the data and should expect to spend as much time in dashboards and spreadsheets as developing creative campaigns (as any of my direct reports can attest, I love a pivot table!). To be credible, being able to talk data is table stakes. 

I feel this largely comes down to “soft skills” or what I refer to as “human skills”. Yes, you also need to establish yourself as a subject matter expert, who is humble and curious to continue to learn and grow, but trust truly comes from the traits below.

• Empathy. Meet people where they are. Listen and come from the perspective of, “how can I help elevate others?”
• Transparency. This is especially applicable to teams. If you think a topic is clear, assume it probably isn’t. I personally prefer to over-communicate with my team versus under-communicate.
• Validation. Humans want to be heard. Be an empathic listener. Even if you disagree on a topic, communicate and know this is perfectly okay too.

These types of traits make people inspired to work with you. Show up in the way you would hope others show up for you.