Part 5 of 7 Keys to Crafting Powerfully Effective Teams
The purpose of an organisation is to achieve its objectives. Different areas and departments must each deliver on their mandate to ensure that the whole organisation can achieve its overarching goal. Powerful and effective teams understand that each team member must play his/her part in order to complete the final artwork.
Trust: the ability to rely on the character, capability, strength, or truth of someone or something. How can a team/organisation be effective if they are double checking or second guessing each other at every turn? This drains energy and focus, creating a huge distraction from achieving the end goal synergistically. The trust factor within a team is thus one of the most critical foundational components for building a successful and unified team.
Trust is also vital for a team’s knowledge acquisition, as they are far more likely to share knowledge, communicate openly with each other and more easily integrate other people into the team.
Let’ get really honest. Do you and your team members genuinely trust each other to do the right thing? Is there a level of trust that allows for people to ask for help? Or if something goes wrong, that the pain of speaking up and owning the problem is less than any other option? Is there a safe space that allows for mistakes (obviously not “serious” or repeated), and that creates an open environment for working together?
If you’re feeling brave, why not sense check this. Remember – there are two different aspects of trust within a team dynamic. Firstly, a basic ‘common’ trust, which encompasses a confidence and belief in your co-workers and the team that they will uphold and honour generally accepted laws, norms and policies. The second is vulnerability-based trust, which comprises having a much deeper confidence and belief that you and your team can take risks, ask for help, admit mistakes, confront and hold each other accountable without fear of humiliation, retaliation or resentment. So ask them on a scale of 1 to 10 how they would rate this. Here is a tip – if they are resistant to sharing, this is probably an indication that this area needs some work.
When trust is established, it increases individual and team accountability as well as innovation, collaboration, creative thinking and productivity, creating an overall strong, effective and cohesive group.
This empowers your team to truly achieve meaningful goals.