Earlier in my career, I remember rankling at a comment from an outside adviser that suggested that  our management team did not trust each other enough to deal with the tough issues.  I disagreed.  We were all motivated, experienced professionals, committed to doing what was right for the business.  Surely we could hunt down and eliminate any elephants that were lurking in corners or that wandered into the room.  It turns out, the adviser was right and the elephants thrived and multiplied!

In fact, the adviser was right about "trust between team members" being an issue for every team and something at the center of most teams that never quite hit their stride.  I can think of many career experiences and consulting assignments, where a lack of trust was at the epicenter of a dysfunctional team.  A few examples:

  • The management group that built a market leader in electronics and then let some gigantic egos  get in the way of working together, only to see the business disappear from the markets that it formerly led. These "leaders" came to dislike each other so much, that they never would meet as a group. There was anything but trust between these so-called team members.
  • An otherwise capable, cross-functional team was forced for political reasons to add a  functional executive’s henchmen to the group.  It was clear that this "toxic" individual was not on the team to do anything other than protect his manager’s turf, and the team performance degraded considerably.
  • A cross-cultural development team (American and Japanese) never overcame their differences in context or style and instead of an integrated approach to developing new products, they divided their efforts and ultimately failed.  This former market leader flat-lined on revenue while during the same four year period, their more nimble competitor grew 7-fold.  Capabilities, capital and expertise were not issues–team performance was.
  • The new CEO of a major technology player described his management team as "collegial" after his first few months on the job.  What he meant to say was that they would not take on the tough issues.  After the first year, all but two members were replaced.

The many and varied approaches to facilitating the development of trust between team members are too lengthy for a single (or even a dozen) blog postings.  Over time, I will return to this topic and offer ideas, suggested resources and perspectives on what I am seeing working with other teams.  For today, think about the team(s) that you lead or that you are involved with, and ask yourself the following six key questions about the level of trust between team members.

What’s the trust-level on this team?

  1. Are we comfortable with each other?
  2. Do we truly understand the professional and personal motivations of each team member?  Are the agendas clear?
  3. Do we talk openly and constructively about individual and team performance?
  4. Are we good at problem-solving as a group?
  5. Are new ideas and new approaches welcomed, discussed and sometimes adopted?
  6. Are our results good?

While by no means an exhaustive list, if you ask and answer these questions honestly, you might just get to the heart of why things are working or why they are not.  And when your adviser looks at you and says that your team has a "trust issue," your first inclination won’t be to disagree.