Today, there are various models out there to explain how a team can become a high-performance team. Almost all of them have one ingredient in common: trust. My favourite is called "The five dysfunctions of a team", by Patrick Lencioni. In his model, the first barrier to a great team is the absence of trust. In simple terms, if there's no trust, there's no team. Without trust, every conflict becomes personal.
When I think about the teams I've been in, as well as those that I work with today, I fully agree. I would have loved to say: "Without trust, there is no success." But that's not really true. You can be successful, in the short term, without trust.
Some highly successful teams are driven by fear, for example. They work extremely hard because they are afraid of being yelled at or getting a bad performance review or even being fired. Fear can produce a brief peak in performance, but in the long run, people will try to escape this situation — and the most talented people will be the first ones out.
In the short term, management by fear may get results faster than trust, because building trust takes time. A certain amount of experience is necessary to reach a level of trust at which I have complete confidence that my colleagues will treat me and the things I share with them in a good and supportive way.
Different types of trust
When you start working with a new team and want to kick-start the bonding process within the team, you might consider doing classic team-building exercises. I'm sure you've all heard of these, and perhaps even participated in a few of them. They usually involve group activities in which some team members are blindfolded and others guide them by giving them verbal instructions. Obviously, the blindfolded team members have to trust that their colleagues won't lead them into danger, such as making them walk into a wall or bump into each other.
Of course, there's also the famous "trust fall", in which one person stands on a chair or table and lets themselves fall backwards, trusting that the others will catch them. These exercises may be clichés, but they do have an effect. They're often fun — and, yes, it certainly requires some trust to do them and feel safe.
However, if you are looking for longer-lasting trust, I wouldn't be so sure. After all, in a trust fall, trust is really needed only in that moment when the person falls. And who would let another person (let alone a colleague) fall and hurt themselves — especially with the entire team looking on? That doesn't mean there's sufficient trust in everyday work situations. The analogy is a bit stretched. My colleague didn't let me fall to the ground, but will he treat sensitive information about me confidentially?
Value the vulnerable
The kind of trust I'm talking about doesn't involve physical danger or adventure. It's more about making yourself vulnerable and being comfortable with that. In her TED talk, American professor and author Brené Brown discusses the power of vulnerability and how important it is for leaders not to put up a wall when they feel vulnerable, but to share what they think and feel. Of course, it is important to find the right balance between being open and transparent with your team and the risk of "oversharing".
To get started, I recommend doing a simple but fun exercise with your team that is usually called "Two Truths and a Lie". Depending on how much time you have and how talkative and creative your team is, you could also extend it to three truths and a lie.
How does it work?
Make sure you are in a place where you won't be disturbed and where everybody can listen to each other. I point that out because I've seen this exercise done in a noisy restaurant where people sat at a long table and only half of them could hear what anyone was saying.
A meeting room is a good idea. This exercise is often done as part of a longer team-building event. In those cases, I love to do it outdoors with the team sitting in a circle around a real or imaginary campfire. Again, make sure everybody can follow what's going on.
Now, the task for each team member is to think of two stories from their life that are interesting and inspiring, which they're happy to share with the team. And, as the name suggests, everyone has to invent a story about something that didn't happen to them — a lie.
If possible, let the team know in advance, so they have enough time to think of their real and fake stories. Even for someone like me, who loves to tell and make up stories, it's stressful to be told: "You have five minutes to come up with three good stories."
To help people understand what's expected of them, it's helpful to provide some examples or ideas for inspiration: tell us about a sporting achievement, a funny incident that happened to you, an amazing coincidence, the time you met someone famous, a birthday surprise, an unusual fact about yourself…
Now, you tell your stories
As team leader, you might want to go first. That will probably put others at ease, and you can set the tone of the activity in terms of how the stories are told, how detailed they are, etc. It shouldn't take longer than two minutes per story.
On the subject of time: obviously larger teams have more stories, which takes more time. In my experience, it's a good idea to split the activity up into several sessions: listen to stories from one or two people at a time, for example, before moving on to something else. That way, people won't get tired but they will look forward to hearing more stories.
After one person has told their stories, the others have to guess which one is fake. If you want, you can turn it into a competition, giving points to those who guess correctly and to the storyteller for how many people believe the lie.
What can you learn from this?
When I do this activity in communication trainings, I follow it up with certain questions: How did you spot the lie? How did the non-verbal communication differ? How did the tone of voice change? Did the true stories have more detail?
However, if you are doing this to strengthen trust and deepen relationships, you should focus more on how people listen to and engage with each other. This exercise offers three main benefits:
- People talk to each other more. They now have three more points of reference with which to start a conversation.
- People feel more connected to each other. It's almost inevitable that team members will relate to some of the stories and discover they have something in common with someone else.
- People open up. They learn that it's OK to share information about themselves, including personal information. And maybe it's better than OK — it might even be fun to share.
All of these benefits will help to build trust among your team members. Once you and your team have done this activity — even if some were hesitant at first — they will trust each other more than before. Of course, it won't immediately transform you into a high-performing team with no conflicts, but you will have taken an important step in the right direction — and had a lot of fun doing it.