FUNDAMENTAL #1: Building Trust
No quality or characteristic is more important than trust. Trust is the foundation for building a team.
TRUST ASSESSMENT ITEMS
- 1. Team members admit their mistakes.
- 6. Team members acknowledge their weaknesses to one another.
- 10. Team members ask for help without hesitation.
- 13. Team members ask one another for input regarding their areas of responsibility.
- 17. Team members acknowledge and tap into one another's skills and expertise.
- 22. Team members willingly apologize to one another.
- 32. Team members are unguarded and genuine with one another.
- 33. Team members can comfortably discuss their personal lives with one another.
NOTES
PERSONAL HISTORIES EXERCISE
Answer the following three questions about yourself:
- Where did you grow up?
- How many siblings do you have and where do you fall in the sibling order (oldest, youngest, etc.)?
- What was the most difficult, important, or unique challenge of your childhood—of being a kid?
What did you learn about your colleagues that you did not know?
PERSONAL HISTORIES EXERCISE
- Describe a time when you felt the most frightened.
- What was your first job? Your worst job?
- Other than your parents, who had the greatest positive impact on you?
What did the person do? How did you feel about it?
BEHAVIORAL PROFILING EXERCISE
- What is your personality type?
- What are the personality types that make up this team? List them below.
- What is the collective team type?
- In what ways do you think the collective type of this team manifests itself?
- In what areas do the personality types of this team seem to be most consistent?
- What does what we've learned about our personality types tell us about potential weaknesses or blind spots?
Think about your personality type and answer these questions:
- What three insights have you had about your own behavioral profile?
How does what you observed affect your interaction with the team?
- Which three to five areas do you find particularly insightful and worth sharing with your team?
- Which insight from your profile highlights a weakness you would like to address for the good of the team?
KEY POINTS—BUILDING TRUST
- Trust is the foundation of teamwork.
- On a team, trust is all about vulnerability, which is difficult for most people.
- Building trust takes time, but the process can be greatly accelerated.
- Like a good relationship, trust on a team is never complete; it must be maintained over time.
NOTES ON BUILDING TRUST
No quality or characteristic is more important than trust. People who aren't afraid to admit the truth about themselves are not going to engage in the kind of political behavior that wastes everyone's time and energy.
Vulnerability-based trust is so rare is that it is just plain hard to achieve, even when teams understand the definition. That's because human beings, especially the adult variety, have this crazy desire for self-preservation. The key ingredient to building trust is not time, it is courage.