The one thing teams need to really communicate, and how to create it
The most successful team leaders spend more time building team trust than all the other team qualities. It’s that important.
Let’s be very specific about what we mean by trust. We don’t mean the ability of team members to predict each other’s behavior because they’ve known each other for a long time. We’re instead talking about the ability to “get real.”
Trust is actually all about the ability to be vulnerable with your teammates without fear that revealing your fears, mistakes, weaknesses, and behaviors will be used against you.
It’s the ability to say things to each other like “I was wrong,” “I’m sorry,” “I made a mistake,” or “I’m not sure.”
How to start building vulnerability-based trust?
Trust is both rare and hard to achieve, requiring ongoing group work and confident leadership.
Here’s a team exercise we use in our workshops to help a group get started becoming more comfortable with expressing vulnerabilities. It’s from Patrick Lencioni and is called the Personal History Exercise.
At a team meeting or off-site, go around the room and have every member of the team share three pieces of information about themselves.
Where you grew up
How many kids were in your family
What was the most difficult or important challenge of your childhood
Whenever we start this exercise, there’s always some fear that it won’t work, but within 20 minutes, teammates are shocked to learn things they never knew about their teammates.
Examples include a manager who moved out of his house at 16 to start a business, a woman who grew up without indoor plumbing, and a designer who moved every year of his childhood and struggled to form deep relationships.
As you can imagine, a safe space for people to be vulnerable helps team-mates get to know each other on a human level, which helps them see each other with empathy and understanding. You’re less likely to jump to conclusions about someone you know deeply.
At the end of one session, a tough-minded high-level executive (who didn’t seem to get along with anyone) said, “wait, I wasn’t being totally honest” and proceeded to share that her father was a three-star general who was a rigid disciplinarian, and she had become a world-class youth violinist, but every time she received rewards or recognition for her music, her father would berate her, to “knock her down a peg or two.”
Light bulbs went off around the room, and everyone in the room now had something they could attribute her behavior to.
Sometimes people just need a safe space to open up.
Exercises like this are far more effective than a trust fall or team outing, but it does help to use a facilitator if you’re not experienced guiding group conversations and being vulnerable yourself.
Team trust-building is an ongoing process that’s never finished, because, without it, teammates won’t feel comfortable challenging each other’s ideas, or sharing their own, which we will discuss tomorrow when we talk about the second team communication skill, conflict.
