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1. Overview
- Trust is a vital component of a team which fosters innovation, sharing, collaboration, and productivity
- To build trust among team members, assess trust, understand gaps, and incorporate positive changes
- Specific actions are required to build trust
2. Trust is Essential to Team Effectiveness
- Trust encourages risk raking
- Allows team members to challenge the normal way of doing things
- Encourages the discovery of more innovative solutions
- Trust facilitates information sharing
- Enables team members to have open honest conversations
- Fosters a feeling of confidentiality - “what’s said in the room stays in the room”
- Trust encourages collaboration
- Allows the team members to spend more time working together than protecting themselves or “watching their backs”
- Trust enhances productivity
- Enables team members to put aside personal goals to achieve common team goals
- Fosters commitment of every member to work together efficiently
3. Build Trust Among Team Members
- Assess Trust
- Catalyze Understanding
- Address Trust
- Practice Behaviors
- Anchor Change
4. Specific Trust Building Actions
- Be honest: be upfront and truthful even with difficult conversations
- Getting caught in a lie destroys trust
- Show people you care: genuinely care about other people’s interests as much as your own
- Being “me-oriented” sets off alarms
- Trust others: give the benefit of the doubt until you have data to the contrary
- Jumping to conclusions inspires mistrust
- Address issues directly: confront the problem to improve the working relationship
- Avoiding issues erodes trust
- Share relevant information: share knowledge, interests, and experiences to create common ground
- Blindsiding someone breaks trust
- Follow through on commitments: act responsibly and reliably by carrying a fair share of the workload
- Missing deadlines (without prior discussions) makes you seem unreliable
- Say “no” when you mean it: let the other person have their needs met elsewhere if you truly can’t handle additional work
- Saying yes without follow through leads to others doubting your commitment
- Share what you know and what you don’t: be generous with your knowledge but admit when you don’t have the answers
- Acting like a “know-it-all” alienates people
