Building Team Rapport: A Deceptively Simple Leadership Experiment

One of the questions facilitators routinely ask at the start of offsites is ‘How will we need to behave with one another to be effective today?’ or ‘What are our conditions for success?’

Great question. Important topic.

Guaranteed someone will say ‘Trust’.

Great answer. Important condition for success.

But here’s the problem: trust is the end result of behaviour rather than a behaviour in and of itself. And you don't build it by asking people to close their eyes and fall backwards into someone else's arms. You can’t simply click your fingers and expect your team to trust each other and you.

Despite this, any research you read on teams will tell you trust is the bedrock for high-performance, so understanding how it's built/eroded, and what you as a leader can do to foster it, is crucial.

If you don’t yet know the Trust Equation it’s a helpful way to think about the question, and proposes that:

Today's Leadership Experiment is designed to increase rapport/intimacy, and alongside the other exercises this month it can help you build towards trust and high-performance in your team. 

WARNING!

Before you engage with this month’s exercises, take a moment to honestly appraise what your leadership style tells people about your attitude to teams. If you’re the leader who jumps straight to the spreadsheet in meetings… rolls your eyes when people talk about ‘this team stuff’... or regularly skips or cancels team update calls… you’ve been unwittingly telling people that ‘team’ is not that important to you. If that is the case I DON'T recommend you jump in with these exercises - it will look fake and disingenuous. Instead, call your coach, set a meeting with your HRD, call me, call the PDC or The Table Group (two great team coaching companies) and get some support on a broader and deeper engagement program for your team.

Your Leadership Experiment - Sharing Leadership Journeys

This is a deceptively simple and powerful exercise I use in team workshops and the impact of it amazes me time and again. Groups of people who were in water-cooler, back-stabbing conflict on morning 1, are suddenly eating together at lunchtime. Rolled eyes and crossed arms are replaced with open smiles and eye contact. It’s amazing.

It’s also the exercise most leaders tell me we should cut from the agenda so we can get on with ‘the real work of the day’. It’s one of those exercises that looks too simple, and too off-topic to really make a major difference, yet its power to help dissolve dysfunction, suspicion and negativity is extraordinary.

Step 1 - This exercise needs to be set up well to work. People need time to plan and you need to set some context. 

First signpost that you’re going to take some time out of your normal monthly meeting to do something a little different. Something like: ‘As we’re all working remotely let’s spend some time in our next meeting on something non-tactical/urgent, something that will help us all get to know each other even better’.

Step 2 - Ask people to prepare a short (about 5 min) presentation about ‘The things that made me the leader I am today’. People might choose to share:

• experiences that have made them the leader/person they are 
• people who had the biggest impact on them
• moment(s) they are proud of? 
• challenges or failures they have faced
• what they’ve learnt about what motivates them and what's important to them

They can present any way they like - they can draw a timeline of these key moments, use images, do a deck or simply speak. 

Sharing these stories enables you and your team, to connect more deeply and understand each other’s motivations, values and behaviours. You get to know each other as people not just functions. It starts to break down the ‘us vs them’ thinking which is at the core of so much team and organisational dysfunction.

Step 3 - When you start the meeting, share your expectation that the team give each other high-quality rapt attention as they share their stories - phones and emails off and, if you’re on zoom, cameras on.

Step 4 - After each person has shared take a moment and invite team members to share back on what they heard and what surprised them.

Step 5 - When everyone has shared, invite the team to comment on what they’ve learned and what the experience has been like for them.

Enjoy and let me know what you discover.