Trust is knowing that when a team member does push you, they're doing it because they care about the team.
Remember teamwork begins by building trust. And the only way to do that is to overcome our need for invulnerability.
Great teams do not hold back with one another. They are unafraid to air their dirty laundry. They admit their mistakes, their weaknesses, and their concerns without fear of reprisal.
Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.
Building a cohesive leadership team is the first critical step that an organization must take if it is to have the best chance at success.
Members of trusting teams accept questions and input about their areas or responsibility, appreciate and tap into one another's skills and experiences, and look forward to meetings and other opportunities to work as a group.
Trust is the confidence among team members that their peers' intentions are good, and that there is no reason to be protective or careful around the group. In essence, teammates are not comfortable being vulnerable with one another.
Members of trusting teams admit weaknesses and mistakes, take risks in offering feedback and assistance, and focus time and energy on important issues, not politics.
Open, frank communication is the lynchpin to teamwork. A fractured team is like a fractured bone; fixing it is always painful and sometimes you have to re-break it to heal it fully - and the re-break always hurts more because it is intentional.
The team you belong to must come ahead of the team you lead: this is putting team results (e.g., organizational needs) ahead of individual agendas (e.g., the team or division you lead, your ego, your need for recognition, your career development, etc.) Confidentiality is respected downward more than it is respected upward. Organizational alignment is a direct result of this hierarchy (if it were the other way around, organizational alignment would be very difficult to achieve).
Trust is the foundation of real teamwork. And so the first dysfunction is a failure on the part of team members to understand and open up to one another. And if that sounds touchy-feely, let me explain, because there is nothing soft about it. It is an absolutely critical part of building a team. In fact, it’s probably the most critical.
A functional team must make the collective results of the group more important to each individual than individual members' goals.
Experiential team exercises can be valuable tools for enhancing teamwork as long as they are layered upon more fundamental and relevant processes.
Achieving vulnerability-based trust (where team members have overcome their need for invulnerability) is difficult because in the course of career advancement and education, most successful people learn to be competitive with their peers, and protective of their reputations. It is a challenge for them to turn those instincts off for the good of the team, but that is exactly what is required.
Team members have to be focused on the collective good of the team. Too often, they focus their attention on their department, their budget, their career aspirations, their egos.
Team members who are not genuinely open with one another about their mistakes and weaknesses make it impossible to build a foundation for trust.
Teamwork remains a sustainable competitive advantage that has been largely untapped because it is hard to measure (teamwork impacts the outcome of an organization in such comprehensive and invasive ways that it's virtually impossible to isolate it as a single variable) and because it is extremely hard to achieve (it requires levels of courage and discipline that few executives possess) - ironically, building a strong team is very simple (it doesn't require masterful insights or tactics).
Success comes only for those groups that overcome the all-too-human behavioral tendencies that corrupt teams and breed dysfunctional politics within them.
Building a strong team is both possible and remarkably simple. But is painfully difficult.
On a team, trust is all about vulnerability, which is difficult for most people.
As difficult as it is to build a team, it is not complicated. In fact, keeping it simple is critical, whether you run the executive staff at a multi-national company, a small department within a larger organization, or even if you are merely a member of a team that needs improvement.
Like a good marriage, trust on a team is never complete; it must be maintained over time.
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