Building High-Performing Teams and Fostering Innovation Requires Trust

Trust is an essential ingredient in a successful team. It involves believing your colleagues have good intentions and will not harm you. When there is trust, team members can be open about their mistakes and weaknesses without fear of judgment. Structured feedback sessions in a safe environment can help identify areas of improvement without negative consequences. It’s essential to trust the intuition of your programmers and give them the space to work remotely or in a private office, knowing that there is always room for software improvement.

Healthy teams engage in ideological conflict, knowing feedback is not meant to harm but to improve. Rather than avoiding conflict, high-performing teams seek it out. They hold each other accountable to high-performance standards by publishing team goals and standards and regularly reviewing processes. The focus is on team results rather than individual milestones, with team members calling each other out if poor performance hurts the team.

Trusting individuals to recognize and pursue opportunities is crucial. An innovative culture should not distinguish between operations and invention, recognizing that innovation is unpredictable and requires a certain level of variation and divergence for self-renewal. Taking risks during good and bad times involves discipline. Developers aim to bring about change, testers strive for risk reduction, and operators seek stability. Combining these functions into a continuous process allows innovation to be achieved.

[¹]: Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?