The Trust Crisis

They Didn’t Trust Each Other...

It was August 1990. I was a young second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Reserve, training as an artillery officer at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

And I’d just watched an entire team die in the desert.

OK, no, they didn’t literally die: We were running leadership scenarios in an exercise where we’d supposedly crashed in the desert. We were divided into six teams — of six trainees each, who had to work as a team to prioritize supplies for their survival.

But one of the teams had just spectacularly imploded…

The Post-Mortem

At the end of the simulation, each officer earned two scores. The first was our individual score ranking each survival item, and the second was the team score — where we all came together and agreed on a ranking.

The scores were read in class. The loud team in the center of the room had an individual with a perfect score, but when the same team’s score was announced, they failed to meet the minimum requirement. So they ‘died’ as a team, even though they had a member with a perfect score.

It’s A Question Of Trust

Each of the soldiers believed they were in a position of authority, so others should trust them. But they had it backward.

Authority doesn’t generate trust. Instead, it’s trust that generates authority.

Of the six teams, my team finished first, even though we didn’t have a single member score in the top 10. That didn’t seem right.

How was it possible for the team with the individual who scored perfectly to lose at the scenario?

When asked, the individual with the perfect score confessed that they were a specialist in Search and Rescue: They had been trained in survival and practiced it for a living.

So what went wrong? The rest of the team failed to trust him.

Specifically, they didn’t embrace his judgment, relying on their own experience — even though his expertise was far superior. Each team member fought for the right to lead, mistakenly believing that ‘leadership’ meant the team should accept their ideas, and listening to someone else was a weakness.

They failed to trust one another.

Conclusion

By giving respect and trust to one another, you open up two-way communication.

This story also applies to business and establishing a culture of trust.

When explaining the success of the company’s culture, Tom Mendoza, former President and Vice Chairman of NetApp, often says:

“People have a different emotional response to something when they know they’ve been heard — versus being dictated to. If people know they’re respected and listened to and that their idea is heard, they go home and think for you. Which can be a powerful contribution to your organization.”

An important lesson is that without team members’ willingness to trust each other, they will fail to survive as a team — no matter how competent they are as individuals — it’s a matter of trust.

*I published a variation of this article previously on my personal blog: medium.com/@richardbliss