Trust: The Alpha and Omega of High Performance Teams

Trust is the glue of life. It's the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It's the foundational principle that holds all relationships. Stephen Covey

'Trust' and its twin sister 'Respect' are the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, of all High Performance Teams. Teams with high levels of trust have a firm foundation to build a high performance culture. Teams with low levels of trust, regardless of their current level of performance, face a downward slide, which if not addressed, leads to eventual failure.

The Fragile Nature of Trust

The nature of trust is both highly subjective and impermanent making it fragile and difficult to maintain in the fast paced and constantly changing world of work.

Trust is defined as "the belief in the reliability, truth or ability of someone”. When we trust someone it means we literally believe that what they say is, or will be, true. And, when subsequent events occur where the other person behaved as expected we further increase our trust in them. Thus, levels of trust are fluid, building up (and destroyed) over multiple encounters with people, and our observation of the consistency (or inconsistency) of their subsequent actions with their stated intent. The fact that trust is built over time and can fluctuate is an important part of understanding workplace relationships which we’ll return to shortly.

Trust is built with consistency. Lincoln Chafee

Trust is also highly subjective with each person having their own version of understandings of decisions and agreements with others, yet believing in the moment of the conversation, that their combined understandings are the same and the reality of a situation unified.  The unspoken assumption of a shared objective reality, creates the first cracks in the bond of trust between two people. As Susan Scott, author of Fierce Conversations points out, there is no objective reality only subjective reality and how often and how deeply we connect and communicate to interrogate our subjective realities and realign to a shared understanding dictates how long our trust in each other will last.

Trust and High Performance Teams

When it comes to HPTs trust is the precursor seed to growing the disciplines needed to build a highly engaging and high achieving team.

In order to Engage effectively we need to have high levels of trust – specifically to enable us to disclose our work/life and wellbeing needs and be able to reciprocate support to others regarding their needs, as well as be able to have ‘courageous conversations’ – giving people feedback when we are uncomfortable with their behaviour towards us, and also receiving this type of feedback from others to maximise the benefits of our diversity (our individual differences) and create effective and harmonious relationships at work.

In order to maximise team Achievement, we need high levels of trust to openly and supportively embrace high levels of accountability and proactively update and engage the team when problems emerge that jeopardise the completion of critical tasks/deadlines in our action plans – which are part of achieving our team’s mission and vision. We also need a high trust environment to enable ongoing performance feedback and innovation as we seek ways to improve productivity and performance for the benefit of the team and the organisation.

The Top 4 Trust Breakdowns

Trust is very important in building High Performance Teams. However, given both the subjective nature of trust AND the fluid nature of trust rising and falling based on multiple experiences there is ample room for problems causing trust breakdowns. Here are my Top 4:

1.   Tyranny Of Distance: Life Changes

One of the most difficult situations to either build trust from scratch or repair trust when previously broken is where there is a lack of regular contact among people. Teams who work remotely, people who simply feel hurt and avoid others, and personality types which thrive on autonomy and independence all accidently create barriers to building trust. Even good-intentioned, skilled communicators still face risks of trust breakdowns when the distance between meeting together and communicating is too great. After all, our subjective reality changes constantly and our failure to update others on these changes builds a void which becomes a chasm when circumstances change to the point we do not fulfill our agreements with others.

2.   Reality Check: Failure To Communicate & Brief Back

The commanding officer: “Send a team of six soldiers to the front gate at 0900 to unload the supply truck”.

“Roger that, six soldiers, front gate 0900 unload supply truck” replied the staff officer.

The failure to communicate clearly and then accurately brief back (check for understanding) is perhaps, the biggest, yet simplest problem I have encountered in trust breakdowns. Listening and observing many frontline managers working with teams I am consistently amazed at (1) how poorly managers communicate tasks to staff (i.e., ‘can you sort ‘that’ out soon’ – what exactly does ‘sort’, ‘that’, and ‘soon’ actually mean?); and (2) how staff fail to brief back/check for understanding after an instruction is given (‘yeh, yeh I get it… will do...’). We could all learn from the military who cannot afford such problems and have protocols for providing instructions and then protocols for brief backs – such a simple system, yet overlooked by most people at work and at home!

3.   Great Expectations: Over Estimating Capability & Capacity

Most of the 7 billion people on earth are ‘sociotropic’ which simply means they like to be liked. This means most of us, to varying degrees are ‘people pleasers’ wanting to minimise conflict and maximise stability in our relationships at work and home – and thus we agree to all sorts of expectations placed upon us by others which are beyond our available time or skill leading to much frustration and blame when results are less then expected. Combine this socio-tropic tendency with another important fact, namely the human tendency to under-estimate the time needed to complete tasks and we are set-up for some real trust breakdowns based on unrealistic expectations we set for ourselves and others.

4.   Passive Aggression: Deception & Harmful Intentions

Thank goodness there is only a small group of people referred to as workplace psychopaths who ‘on purpose’ seek to harm you by breaking trust through not delivering on promises made. Research suggest only 1% of the population have a tendency to harm others for their own personal gain or pleasure but that 1% can end up filling the ranks of management making it more problematic in senior leadership roles where 3-4% may have this tendency.

Increasing Trust: Fast-tracking the Change Journey

When it comes to building trust in new teams or repairing trust in establishing teams the fast-track approach has two layers: (1) the implementation of group structures to enable higher frequencies of consistent behaviour; and (2) the implementation of personal skills training and coaching to lower individual conflict avoidance and increase tolerance of developmental feedback.

1.   Team Structures: Consistency & Frequency Of Contact

Given we know that the fluid nature of trust builds up or breaks down over many interactions between people the obvious fast-track is to implement structures that increase the consistency and frequency by which people have positive and reliable encounters with each other. Thus the focus on team meetings and regular check-ins becomes crucial for fast-tracking success. But it is not simply about increasing the FREQUENCY of team meetings and check-ins with colleagues. It is also about the STRUCTURE of these meetings and check-ins – agreed protocols that EVERYONE follows so vulnerability to disclose is shared by all and accountability to report back is also shared by all. Don't fall into the trap of making trust building activities optional – either ‘all in’ or take a step back and start smaller…

The other part of team structures for trust is the ‘above and below the line’ team charter with agreed do’s and don'ts for the team and an agreed way ‘to call people on their behaviour’. When teams take the time to actually discuss and document the important positive and negative behaviours that impact the team and the agreed way to ‘tap each other on the shoulder’ to prevent minor niggles becoming major problems through informal feedback they are much less likely to suffer trust breakdowns.

2.   Personal Resilience: Reduce Conflict Avoidance & Increase Feedback Skills

Conflict avoidance is a primordial self-protective urge – to reduce pain and increase pleasure – something I have written about in previous posts. This urge or impulse biases us away from giving and receiving genuine feedback to enable us to ‘fit in’ better and optimise team engagement. Thus the other layer of fast-tracking trust is to increase people’s resilience and skill in giving and receiving feedback.

Training people for feedback is primarily about practice, practice, practice! There is some important self-awareness/body language exercises and basics on showing respect and communicating clearly but beyond this it is all about role plays and repeatedly doing the skills. This desensitises people to to their fears of conflict and rejection and increases their tolerance making them more powerful and effective communicators and team members.

Maximising Trust in High Performance Teams

In bringing it all together we can see just how important trust is for high performance teams, as well as how difficult it can be to both establish and maintain high trust in the constantly changing world of work. We can also see how easy it is to fall into the 4 traps that lead to trust breakdowns.

The secret to success for building high trust teams is to make sure (1) teams have effective and frequent meetings and check-ins where everyone is involved in both disclosure and accountability and (2) each team member has high levels of skill and tolerance for feedback. By developing these two layers (team and individual) of structure and support in your team you will quickly establish sustainable levels of high trust and not only prevent trust breakdowns but also be able to repair relationships should this ever be necessary!

Ride The Waves of Life!

Dr Pete Stebbins

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Dr Pete Stebbins, PhD is a Workplace Psychologist and Executive Coach. With many years of research and professional practice behind him he has managed to complete and evaluate numerous leadership and team transformation projects providing the ground swell for the common sense approach of the High Performance Teams Framework. Pete is a regular on LinkedIn writing on Leadership, Teams, Resilience & Life Strategy. Contact Pete at: [email protected] or visit drpetestebbins.com