As a leader, one of the most important things you can do is to build trust with your team and among your team members.
Teams without trust have interpersonal tension and frustration, are less motivated, play politics, and cannot get important decisions made. Trust is the foundation of effective teamwork.
This all starts with you as a leader. Are you honest and transparent with your team, do you keep your promises, and do you treat everyone with a high level of respect? If you can answer YES to all of these, then you are off to a good start.
Once you are role modeling integrity, the next thing you can do is to show that you are human. Admit your mistakes and share vulnerability now and then.
Building trust among team members is largely a matter of helping them get to know one another better. Here are some activities that you and your team can do together to build trust:
- Do some of the personality assessments and share results. My favorite is the CliftonStrengths, which tells you things that you are really good at. This is a great thing to share and most people are usually willing to talk about their strengths.
- Get out of the office – even if it is just for the day. Go to a park or do a ropes course. I have seen lots of team relationships develop after everyone completes a “trust fall”
- Share Personal Histories. Ask everyone to tell their life story in three segments – it can be chronological or share different aspects of your life. Some people are more private than others – which is fine. But it can definitely deepen relationships to find out someone’s story.
- Explore one another’s values. There are a number of ways to do this and here is one resource. The activity gives each person to talk about what is important to them and why.
There are many more things you can do, but this is a good starter list. After doing some of these you can set up a team-building committee with responsibility to set up regular activities to help the team bond.
Establishing trust is essential for every high performing team. Be sure to continue role modeling integrity as you encourage your team to get to know one another better and better. The end result will be a team that enjoys working together and achieves excellence.
