Teams: A perspective on building trust

Building a team is awesome. Think about it, you are charged with assembling a group of talented individuals who can rise to any challenge thrown their way. How this group functions, how they carry themselves as a team, how they respond under pressure, it’s all an extension of the tone and expectations you set as a leader (no pressure). As a leader, you are part of the team, you’ve just chosen a different seat on the bus.

Trust

There are already a lot of articles and books written on “building trust”. In my experience, if your team lacks trust, they probably lack ownership and accountability; they probably aren’t bringing their authentic selves to the team. If this is the case, what perspectives are you losing and what experiences are being tossed out?

When building a team, one of the first foundations I like to focus on is trust. The individuals on the team need to know that I am their advocate.

As a leader, they should trust that I will hold them accountable to their personal brand and that I expect them to do the same of me.

You have to invest the time in knowing the people on the team, literally, you should know and genuinely care about the person and their growth. You also need to demonstrate the same level of investment in the team as a whole; how does it function with the people who make up the team operating together? What are the gaps on the team and what are the strengths?

The Individual

I used to tell people they should have the “freedom to fail”, however, I now believe this is better represented as “permission to fail”. Message this to the individuals on your team so they know that it’s okay to fail, it’s almost an expectation (after all it is the best way to learn). If failure isn’t happening, question how hard they are actually pushing themselves to grow. Don’t misunderstand me though, this doesn’t mean that someone can break production with every code deploy and I’m gonna give them a high five for failing. It’s important that the same mistakes aren’t happening over and over again (that becomes a performance conversation). The point is, are people growing?

As a leader, it’s important that the individuals on your team see when you fail as well. You broke production? BOOM! Golden plunger award. Don’t hide your mistakes, lead from the front and own them!

It’s okay to admit your mistakes, your team will appreciate it and will likely follow in your footsteps.

I believe that failure lies with a leader and success belongs to the team. Practice that.

The Team

I was a member of the Fire Service for 7 years, in which I learned a lot of great lessons surrounding building cohesive teams. I attribute a lot of my leadership style to my experiences as a Firefighter. One of the most impactful takeaways has been one of the easiest to implement. Eating together is a basic bonding technique. Once a week my team sits together in a conference room and has lunch together. This is framed as a “lunch and learn” and it started off with the group sitting and learning more about each other, leave out the day-to-day business and just have real conversations with each other. As trust builds and bonds form, people start putting themselves “out there” by teaching or having discussions about something they are passionate about (I lead engineering teams so this is often some cool project someone’s working on or a new technology someone’s playing with). Teaching to the group builds confidence (the presenter gains confidence with the audience and the audience gains confidence with the presenter) and empathy continues to build.

Don’t forget to celebrate successes on your team, as a team. You don’t have to do anything extravagant, some of the best team outings I’ve been part of have been really low key. Just get out of the office!

Cohesive Teams

It really is a great thing when your team operates as a cohesive unit that genuinely cares about one another. With trust as a strong core value on your team, you inherit greater individual accountability (“I don’t want to let the team down”) and ownership which strengthens the team as a whole. I’ve observed higher retention rates during challenging times (“I’m staying because of the team”) and more honest conversations among peers.

The team starts mingling outside of work, they want to spend time together because they enjoy each other. The team is just more authentic. They don’t take themselves (or you) too seriously. They get their jobs done and they do it well.

Backed by trust, ownership, and accountability, when a crisis happens the team buckles down and swarms as a single unit to resolve the issue.

So you’ve built an all-star team, they are self-sustaining and high-performing, they demonstrate accountability and ownership, they operate as a cohesive unit. Now what…? You need to keep investing in the growth of the team. What brings the team to that next level now that you aren’t having to actively manage the foundation?

Mistakes I’ve Made

A leadership role empowers you to set a foundation to build a team upon, but you must let the team frame and fill in the house.

No two teams you lead are the same, trying to force them into mirroring each other just doesn’t work and isn’t fair to the individuals on the team.

Let your team have a voice! Earlier in my management career I tended to speak “for” the team rather than “with” the team. What did that teach? Was I removing the roadblock or was I introducing a new one? Seriously, how was I helping anyone on that team have a voice? Protect the team, be an advocate, but don’t shelter.

As a leader you are setting the tone and modeling the behavior you want others to follow, even when you don’t think you are. If you are working crazy hours and not maintaining a healthy work/life balance, what expectations are you passively setting? You have team members who will see this behavior as the expectation. Very quickly you risk losing team members to burn out (maybe even yourself). Don’t forget to take care of yourself! Stress and burnout will manifest itself in some form that you usually won’t be too proud of later.

What strategies do you use when building your teams? Do your strategies change much when you’ve built that high functioning team? How do you address unhealthy teams? I’m interested in hearing your thoughts!