Building Trust and Dependence in Your Team

Paola Doebel shares invaluable insights on the journey beyond assembling a diverse team to truly integrating and unleashing its potential.

It’s about nurturing trust and creating interdependence, where diversity becomes a formidable tool rather than a barrier.

She shares strategies to transform a group of talented individuals from various backgrounds into a cohesive unit capable of surpassing conventional expectations.

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Creating a High-Performing, Diverse Team

By Paola Doebel

What the Idea Is: So you’ve built a diverse team; now what do you do? Achieving the first goal of building the most capable and competent team for the future required time, effort, and a thoughtful process. However, for the leaders of those teams, the work has only just begun. Simply putting people on the same team under the same leader does not mean they will work together, share ideas, or contribute in impactful ways. Creating a trusting environment of diverse team members who care about each other, respect each other, and value each other’s contributions, even when they don’t always agree, requires a leader who intentionally and thoughtfully manufactures a positive growth environment. It takes time, planning, and focus. As a leader who had to do this very thing, I spent as much time thinking about my team as I did my business. I knew there was something almost magical that could be created, but not easily replicated, if I could crack the code.

My first real diversity challenge was bringing together a team of people (male and female) who lived in eight cities across six countries, who spoke ten languages, and were from four very different religious affiliations. While many leaders will not have a challenge of that magnitude, the problem is the same. It boils down to the first critical question: How do I get this team to trust each other? Once trust is built, the next question/obstacle is: How do I get this team to depend on each other? If trust and dependence are built, then the team is now more than just a group of individuals with interesting and unique backgrounds. It is a unit working together to achieve a mission. When that happens, the unit can accomplish and achieve unbelievable results. At that point, the diversity of the unit becomes a powerful and valuable tool because the unit can approach almost any problem or challenge with enough ideas and collective skills/tools in their toolbox to find resolutions and solutions faster and more creatively than their competition.

Why It Is Valuable: Unless strong leadership builds trust and dependence among the team, diversity alone can be as destructive as it can be productive. The very differences and range of attributes that can bind a team and make them a powerful unit can pull the team apart if leadership is not intentional in its efforts.

How It Works:

1. First, the team members need to trust the leader. In the most diverse team scenario, which likely means the leader is also considered diverse, the relationship starts at the most basic exploratory level. For the leader, that is real work. I approached each of my team members with an open and inquisitive mind. How could I value their perspective and contribution if I really did not understand the root of the idea, the feedback, and the input? I had to put aside my assumptions and learn about each of them, both individually and collectively. I studied history, culture, and religion. I read books, visited museums, tried new foods, and asked genuine questions. I learned about Chinese medicine, Muslim holidays, Japanese cultural evolution, the impact of the ancient maritime silk road, and the history and impact of trade and colonialism on South Asia, as well as many other fascinating topics. I genuinely wanted to understand the lens through which my team saw the world and approached their roles. That authenticity was obvious and helped me build trusting relationships.
2. I cannot put a time limit on the process, but it does not happen overnight. It took dedicated time, an authentic desire to learn and understand, and many hours of engagements with my team on many of these topics.
3. The leader needs to intentionally create/manufacture opportunities, projects, and programs for each team member to own that contribute to the success of the team, drive productivity, or enable efficiency for the benefit of the group. Each team member should be required to interact, coordinate, or collaborate with other team members to complete their project, program, or effort. The best projects or programs are long-term responsibilities delegated to a single team member to own for the benefit of the entire team because they require consistent and regular interaction over a long period of time. The team member should also have a regular cadence to read out progress, either via email or on a staff call. Activities like this help drive tactical, non-threatening, consistent engagements that are beneficial for the group as a whole when they are completed.
4. The next step is to pull the team together to decide on longer-term strategic projects to be worked by subsets of the team. These should be for the long-term benefit of the business. Each project team is required to work together to develop, structure, and execute the plan. It is important that the leader oversee some of this work to ensure the team is working together and enabling equal participation across all members. A regular cadence of read-outs and progress updates to the broader team is important. I also recommended that each read-out be led by a different member of the team to ensure each member of each team is put in a position to lead and vocalize the work and progress of the group. Final presentations prior to execution should require all members to have a speaking part.
5. It is also critically important that the leader of the team build an environment where the team is comfortable to speak freely and openly without fear. This becomes more challenging the more culturally diverse the team is oriented. I recommend understanding and learning how to engage each member in a meeting in a way that is culturally sensitive but enables them to express their thoughts and points of view openly. A good start to this process is to speak with each team member in a one-on-one setting to articulate the goal and desire to have the team contribute openly. Ask how best to ensure and engage that team member in an open forum. During those moments of open team engagement, the leader has to be very attentive and observant of the group dynamics to ensure the engagement is orchestrated and moderated in a productive way without overly controlling the discussion. The more this happens and the more the team trusts each other, the easier it will become for the leader to initiate the discussion and allow the team to take it forward.
6. Most large companies do feedback sessions at least one time per year. Those feedback surveys are important and should be taken seriously, especially as new leaders with new team members are learning to work together. A best practice to garner the most productive results, especially from highly diverse teams, is for the leader to nominate a team captain to lead a discussion about the results without the leader present. Using myself as an example, I would look through the results and focus on a few key questions that I thought were important for me to understand in more detail and ask for ideas to help improve. I knew the team would not tell me directly, so I employed the team captain idea. On behalf of the broader team, during a follow-up staff meeting, the “team captain” would read out a summary of the discussion and provide ideas. The “team captain” for a discussion like this has to be a senior team member who is highly respected by all members of the team.
7. Leading diverse teams and building trust and dependence is about more than just work programs and strategy projects. Most leaders do team-building sessions as part of the process they use to build camaraderie. I did not believe that team dinners or simple outings were enough to build real trust and understanding. I knew from my own process in learning about individuals that I had to create a learning and cultural appreciation environment. As the leader of a global team, I was able to bring the team together in person one to two times per year. We chose a different location for each meeting, based on where the team resided. The “host” team members were responsible for our cultural deep-dive team-building experience. They had this amazing moment to teach all of us about them, their history, their culture, their homes, and their backgrounds. These sessions were unbelievably powerful unity-building experiences. We did UNESCO world heritage tours, street food tours, tea ceremonies, and calligraphy classes, to name a few—all organized and led by members of the team who showed great pride in their homes. We all learned so much about each other beyond the numbers and the facts.
8. We collectively celebrated each other’s holidays and recognized their importance in each other’s lives. I still receive “Happy Thanksgiving” emails from team members in Asia and “Merry Christmas” notes from team members who do not celebrate Christmas. It is a beautiful thing to experience people who care about each other’s important moments, even when they don’t participate in them themselves.

Building and leading diverse teams structured for the future of business is a leadership challenge. Positive results are not a foregone conclusion unless leaders create and foster an environment that leads to those results. Success is determined by:

1. Engagement of the team with each other in group settings
2. Completion and execution of short and long-term projects
3. KPI success and business outcomes, achieved by a growth mindset and collective participation
4. Progressive improvements in employee surveys about their leader and the engagement of that leader with the team
5. Future performance of team members (Are they getting promoted and progressing?)
6. Whether team members continue to be confidants and allies, even when they move to other teams

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