{"id":5810,"date":"2016-11-10T12:57:42","date_gmt":"2016-11-10T14:57:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.plataformatec.com.br\/?p=5810"},"modified":"2016-11-11T09:50:06","modified_gmt":"2016-11-11T11:50:06","slug":"how-to-improve-trust-among-team-members","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.plataformatec.com.br\/2016\/11\/how-to-improve-trust-among-team-members\/","title":{"rendered":"How to improve trust among team members"},"content":{"rendered":"

You may be facing lack of trust among your team members and you have not noticed it yet. Actually, it is very difficult to notice it, since trust is often something unconscious for us.<\/p>\n

In this post, I will highlight the importance of trust in a team and, then, list a few actions that you should take to improve trust among teammates.<\/p>\n

Why you should care<\/h2>\n

You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you don’t trust enough. — Frank Crane, American minister and author<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Teams with trust deficiency tend to take longer to deliver their tasks. They will hesitate on asking for help, hold grudges, avoid spending time together and have other behaviors that contribute on slowing the team down.<\/p>\n

As you can see in this pyramid from Patrick Lencioni’s book “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”, without trust your team doesn’t have the foundation for being a high-performance team.<\/p>\n

\"Pyramid<\/p>\n

There are a few indicators of trust absence and I’ll try to explain them in more details, so you can identify the problem in your teams. Later I’ll talk about the actions that you can start taking in order to build trust.<\/p>\n

Lack of Trust Indicators<\/h2>\n

The hints that I’m going to discuss in this post are not only related to lack of trust, but if you see one or more of them, you might want to start thinking if you have this problem or not.<\/p>\n

Information Silos<\/h3>\n

People usually hide information from the ones they don’t trust. That is natural and many times you are unaware of doing so. But as a team member, you can probably see the effects of that trust deficiency.<\/p>\n

The first thing you will notice is that some information will be siloed in a small group of people or just one person. It is common to have specialists in a team, but if you have someone that is the only specialist in a task that the team performs daily, then the person is probably not sharing that knowledge with others. That behavior can be due to fear of being replaced by someone with the same knowledge, being compared etc.<\/p>\n

Dread meetings<\/h3>\n

If you feel people are never comfortable when they receive the announcement of a meeting, they might have trust issues. Since they are not fond of sharing information, meetings become useless and boring for them.<\/p>\n

Cliques<\/h3>\n

Wikipedia defines clique<\/a> as:<\/p>\n

“… a formation of two or more individuals who share bonding characteristics that allow them to identify with one another to form a social network. Those within the group communicate and associate with each other more so than with those outside of the group<\/strong>.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Cliques are a classic example of trust issues. If you have a team that is divided in different cliques, they will prefer to handle work themselves than share work with “outside” people.<\/p>\n

Preference for individual work<\/h3>\n

The same way as cliques, you can spot lack of trust if people in your team prefer to work alone without asking or sharing any information. However, it is important to not confuse introspection with trust issues. Usually, introspective people tend to do things on their own, but when faced with difficulties they will probably share them to complete the task. On the other hand, a person with trust issues might just try to solve it by herself.<\/p>\n

Workload disparity<\/h3>\n

This is common to see when there’s lack of trust. The workload given to some people is much higher than to other people. Moreover, usually not only the amount is different but also the importance of the tasks.<\/p>\n

Actions<\/h2>\n

Ok, we know how to detect the problem, but how are we going to solve it? Well, as all management problems, there is no silver bullet to it. However, I’ll show some actions that you can apply on your team that are best practices and, depending on the roots of the problem, it might help you boost trust among teammates.<\/p>\n

Start by… trusting<\/h3>\n

The first thing that you should do is trust. Well, thank you captain obvious<\/em>. You might think that it sounds stupid or obvious, but what I mean here is that, not only you<\/strong> need to start trusting other people, but you need to also promote this behavior in order to disseminate it. Leading by example is the key here.<\/p>\n

One way to improve this would be to explicitly demonstrate trust by saying phrases like: “I agree with you”, or “I know you can handle this”. It will make people see the change in your behavior and start imitating it, even if unaware of it.<\/p>\n

According to Dr. Henry Cloud\u2019s book, Boundaries for Leaders<\/em>, you can improve making these explicit changes by:<\/p>\n