This article is part of a series focused
on building trust within teams.
Teams can’t reach the highest levels of
productivity and effectiveness without high levels of trust – they just can’t.
Intuitively, most of us know this, but there’s still a tendency in leadership
circles to bifurcate warm, fuzzy concepts like trust and hard concepts like
results and revenue. The truth though is the two are inextricably linked. Let’s
explore just a few of the many reasons why trust is such an important a
necessary ingredient for broader team success and enhanced business results.
#1 Trust Builds Psychological Safety
Google’s study on
what makes their teams successful found that the number one factor for
team success is psychological safety. Timothy R. Clark, CEO of LeaderFactor and
author of the forthcoming book, The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety:
Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation clarifies the
relationship between trust and psychological safety.
“Trust is essentially the predictive
understanding of another's behavior. The link between trust and psychological
safety is based on my prediction of your behavior based on your pattern of
behavior. If I can predict that you won't embarrass, punish, or humiliate me
when I'm interacting with you and others in a social setting, I'm much more
likely to engage, participate, and release my discretionary efforts. If I don't
trust that you will keep me safe, that lack of trust will trigger my
self-censoring instinct and I'll play it safe and manage my own personal
risk."
Timothy R. Clark, CEO of LeaderFactor
Indeed, high levels of trust are necessary for
team members to feel safe to speak up, ask questions, or make suggestions
without fear of retribution or concern that their comments might damage their
relationships or reputation. It’s hard to imagine how team members can feel
true psychological safety without high levels of trust.
#2 Trust Encourages Questioning
Virtually everyone will admit (if they’re
honest), that they’ve experienced situations in the workplace where they had
questions about a task, assignment or project but they were hesitant to ask
those questions because they didn’t want to “seem stupid” or “rock the boat”.
At its core these fears represent low levels of trust. Team members are often
hesitant to ask valid questions and/or seek clarification because they don’t
trust that that questioning won’t come back to bite them later or create a
negative impression with others (e.g. “I can’t believe she asked that –
what a rookie!”).
The reality though is that questioning very
often leads to better decision making, enhanced results and valuable
clarification of communications. As a trainer, I have a communications activity
where I split a large group into pairs – sender and receiver – where the sender
describes an image on a piece of paper and the receiver draws it exactly as
described. However, I only let half the receivers ask questions (Group A). The
other half (Group B) can’t ask any questions throughout the process and are
only permitted to draw whatever their sender describes. Invariably, at the end
of the activity Group B (who couldn’t ask questions) finishes first, but the
output is often horrendous. The images the receivers draw in this group often
look nothing like the image that was described while in Group A, their ability
to ask questions and clarify instructions clearly leads to much better
drawings. The same phenomenon happens in the workplace only there the mishaps,
misunderstood instructions or differences in interpretation can yield much more
significant, costly consequences. Indeed, trust is what enables a new employee
to ask their boss to clarify the scope of a task delegated to them, pick up the
phone to ask a colleague for help with a problem when they’ve hit a wall or
even raise questions or concerns with a senior leader when they might be making
a questionable or risky decision. Trust isn’t just a feel good commodity – it
directly impacts output quality.
#3 Trust Creates Goodwill (and Minimizes
Miscommunications)
With communications there often is very little
black and white; instead, there are perspectives and interpretations. We’ve all
seen those optical illusions like this one where you see two very different
images (in this case two faces or a tree) depending on how you look at it or
where you choose to focus.
This same phenomenon happens all the time with
our daily workplace communications. We’ve all received an email or text message
from someone who sounded “hot” - maybe they sounded like they were barking
orders or condescending to us. Quite often, the way we receive the message is
very much dependent on our underlying relationship with them and our level of
trust in that relationship. Without trust, we’re much more likely to “clap
back” and allow the message to snowball into a conflict, but trust creates a shield
of goodwill that allows us to view their comments through a different, more
well intentioned lens (e.g. “Oh, she must have misunderstood my
request. I’ll just swing be her office and see if she’s free for lunch so I can
clarify” vs. “Where does she get off? I knew she had an attitude problem, Let
me put her in her place right now!”) It’s easy to see how
something as “small” as a misinterpreted email can snowball into
misunderstandings and strained relationships – both of which can undoubtedly
create an environment that fosters diminished results and productivity.
#4 Trust Encourages Innovation and Rapid
Decision Making
High trust environments encourage innovation,
speed decision making and repel stagnation within teams. The Workplace
Therapist Brandon Smith insists, “Trust enables teams to not just take risks
but also to move more quickly. There’s little second guessing in high trust
environments because team members assume there’s positive intent.” Indeed,
innovation requires a willingness to try, fail, and try again, and low trust
environments just tend not to support that spirit of risk taking. Without risk
taking, it’s difficult to innovate. Also, it’s hard for teams to move swiftly
if they’re not really trusting one another. Without trust they tend to second
guess one another, rework tasks unnecessarily, or rely on one or two team
members instead of trusting a broader group. The opportunity cost of this is
speed – time to market, speed of decision making or project completion time.
#5 Trust Enhances Morale
At the end of the day, teams have more fun
when they trust one other. After all, the entire concept of team is being able
to depend on each other and working in a low trust environment is a complete
drag while working in a high trust environment can feel like a real high. Who
wants to work around people they can’t trust or worse yet people who don’t
trust them! At best that type of low trust environment might eek out quality
results in the short term, but longer term, it’s a recipe for dysfunction and
failure.
Military and law enforcement environments
often insist that trust is an absolute precondition for effectiveness on the
front lines. It’s easy to understand that they can’t put their lives on the
line each day without the highest levels of trust that their comrades have
their back. Indeed, most will agree that trust is a necessary ingredient for
highly productive teams, so the next logical question is how do you
build it? I tackle this topic with specific, practical techniques and
suggestions in my next article….stay tuned!
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