The crux of building a high-performing team requires trust. Without it, you’re left with siloed contributors, while exposing your team to the perils of miscommunication, misalignment, and infighting.
Trust will continue to be a source of competitive advantage for teams that choose to do the deep work of cultivating it.
What is Team Trust?
Trust is perhaps the most buzzworthy, yet least understood component of a team’s culture dynamic. Words like authenticity, honesty, and transparency often come to mind first.
WinShape Teams conceptualizes the richest forms of trust as the bedrock of the world’s highest-performing teams, like Team Avaya.
This kind of trust is the sort forged by team members’ whole-hearted commitment to work toward complete authenticity with themselves and with one another.
It oftentimes means willingly subjecting oneself to enter into intense and uncomfortable experiences alongside fellow teammates.
Cultivating this form of trust requires you to allow others to see you in your most vulnerable settings, while simultaneously serving as a support to others on the team to ensure that fear of failure, guilt, etc. are erased from the team mentality entirely.
It means diligently owning your own role, in addition to responding empathically and decisively in your fellow team members’ time of need.
You are more willing to operate in this way over time, because you know that the person to your left and on your right are fiercely committed to the same mentality as you are.
This is team trust.