To quote Patrick Lencioni, author of best–selling book ‘The Five Dysfunctions of a Team’.
In order to create effective and cohesive teams, Patrick states that teams must overcome the five dysfunctions highlighted in his model and ‘Trust’ is the foundation required to accomplish this.
Yet the Edelman Trust Barometer, Trust and Credibility Survey 2018, found that only 43% of the 3,000 respondents trust their organisation. Edelman’s survey saw a decline in trust in both the media and Government over the last 12 months.
Is there any hope?
So, with such a lack of trust in our environments and a pessimistic outlook – is there any hope? Yes! Many organisations such as Microsoft are already implementing Patrick Lencioni’s strategy and reaping the benefits.
But many organisations are yet to see the value of creating trust within the workplace. Today more than ever, the opportunity for businesses to act and fill this gap offers huge benefits.
Many organisations experiencing reduced performance or profits automatically look to enhance their products/services, change their pricing structure or look at other strategies to improve. Quite often the answer is simple; look at the degree of trust within the organisation.
Lack of trust can reduce employees’ confidence, making them reluctant to cooperate as teams, preferring to work in isolation, looking out for number one and at the same time stunting future growth and development. This approach to personal gain is not in the best interests of teamwork, or the organisation.
Benefits of trust
Trust needs to take place between all stakeholders – whether that is employees and employers, colleagues and peers or customers and suppliers; it also needs to be reciprocal. By developing a strong element of trust across organisations they benefit from:
- Increased productivity
- Enhanced morale
- Lower staff turnover
- Ability to handle challenges and take risks
- Enriched creativity
- Tackle change with more optimism through effective and efficient teamwork
- Improved quality of services
- Enhanced corporate reputation
- Higher profitability
According to Patrick Lencioni, ‘Trust is about vulnerability, team members who trust one another learn to be comfortable being open, even exposed, to one another around their failures, weaknesses, even fears.’ However, this can be difficult to achieve, who wants to actively make themselves vulnerable and let down their guard, feeling unsafe? Resistance may occur, but it is important for everyone to be involved, from the top downwards for it to be truly embedded.
Where do you start?
Breakthroughs in terms of vulnerability and trust come when you introduce a behavioural profiling tool that allows team members to accurately and openly assess their strengths and weaknesses.
This provides a safe language for describing differences/similarities which, validated by an objective tool, also provides huge insights. It allows individuals to not only understand themselves, but also understand others and have respectful appreciation for their strengths and weaknesses. By highlighting their vulnerabilities, it creates a connection with each other which helps construct a support mechanism.
Lisa McQuerrey quoted in her article, The Importance of Trust within a team, March 2018. “Everyone has different strengths and knowing you can count on your team members to fill in your missing gaps helps reduce stress and improve productivit. Relying on the strengths of others while offering to contribute your own level of expertise creates a cohesive approach to group work.”
‘The number one action companies can take to build trust is to treat employees well’
Once this has been introduced, how do organisations further develop this trust within teams and can it be regained if it has previously been compromised? Recommendation from Edelman’s report states ‘The number one action companies can take to build trust is to treat employees well’.
- Organisations need to start by putting their people at the centre of their corporate strategy. They are your most important competitive advantage, so don’t treat them as another statistic, treat them as individual assets to your business.
- Two of the biggest obstacles also highlighted are dishonesty and lack of transparency. Answer questions honestly, take responsibility when mistakes happen and learn from them. Don’t try and hide the truth, this only encourages distrust.
- Encourage open communication and engage in sharing of opinions and ideas. Being open, transparent and acting with integrity will earn you respect.
- Treat all employees equally and allow them to take on responsibility for their own tasks to create employee empowerment; praise them for their good performance.
- Above all else listen to and support your employees, become your team advocate, as this is crucial for the trusting process to be effective.
Trust can be regained, by implementing all the above. But, this it is much harder to reverse than to establish in the beginning, so ensure you value its importance and try and prevent lack of trust occurring.
The key to organisational performance
The key to organisational performance is to understand and actively embrace trust and to merge the value of trust into corporate culture.
Introduce trust building team activities as a strategic priority, but also ensure that action plans are developed to follow up to ensure that trust is being sustained long-term. You will be surprised at how quickly trust can be developed and the value that you will gain.
Learn more
To learn more about improving teamwork and view case studies from those organisations that have benefitted from implementing The Five Behaviours of a Cohesive team programme, based on Patrick Lencioni’s strategy, please click here.
