Building Trust in Teams
How on Earth is this possible? It’s actually quite simple. Don’t manage them. We can’t change anything until we get fresh ideas and begin to see things differently. — James Hillman
Holding someone hostage does not lead to peak performance. Creating a team charter helps answer critical questions about the team’s purpose, values, and working style. It also helps coach team members, improve communication, and give and receive feedback. Showing appreciation for each other is a simple way to improve relationships within the team or community.
Trust is the confidence that your peers have good intentions and aren’t out to harm you. Teams that trust one another are comfortable being vulnerable and can admit mistakes and weaknesses. Teams should practice exchanging feedback in structured environments. In these safe environments, they can identify strengths and weaknesses without repercussions. Functional teams engage in ideological conflict. With trust, they know feedback isn’t meant to damage a person but rather to improve them. Teams should seek out sources of conflict instead of avoiding them. High-performing teams hold each other accountable to high-performance standards. This means publishing team goals and standards and instituting regular process reviews. Great teams are focused on team results, not individual milestones. This is possible because individuals know their peers will call them out if their poor performance hurts the team.
Bureaucracies are no match for complexity. They can’t handle the surprises we face every day, and worse, they’ll never surprise us with an unexpected breakthrough. This brings us to one of the most important things leaders and teams need to internalize: our way of working is made up. This is different from how it has to be or has always been. Every organization has a purpose. But not every organization ensures that its purpose is fractal — that it shows up at every level. The team’s purpose serves the same function as the organizational one. Legacy Organizations are obsessed with measurement, often using it as a form of control — to find and punish weak performance. But when we obsess over metrics, we fall victim to Goodhart’s law, which states that a measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure. You’re doing it wrong if you aren’t making decisions and taking action based on your metrics. Ask every team in your organization to articulate their essential intent. Clarify your purpose so you can see it three decades later. Then tighten up your road map for the next half year.
Purpose enables freedom and autonomy by ensuring coherent action. The sense at the bottom is that leadership doesn’t trust anyone. In collaborative team projects, relationships play a crucial role. It’s essential to allow local methods and tools to flourish instead of imposing uniformity. Prioritizing workflow coordination and improvement is more valuable than seeking a one-size-fits-all solution. All teams should be free to perform their work and enhance their processes.
Many of us face bandwidth concerns that slow down our work. Working on small raw output rather than large polished chunks improves productivity. The goal is to optimize workflow to cut waste and maximize value creation.
[¹]: Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?
