How to Build Trust On Your Team

Gaining trust from others
begins by giving trust to others.

"I'll get back to you on that."

I uttered these famous last words to a graduate student at UCLA when I worked for Siemens many years ago. I never did get back to him. I don't remember why.

Two years later, when I became chief administrative officer of an institute at UCLA, my failure to follow through cost me, big time. This graduate student became a young professor in our institute and told my boss, the director of the institute, that he preferred not to work with me on any of our project teams because he didn't trust me. Ouch!

For me, the moral of the story is that trust is often difficult to establish, easy to break, and hard to reclaim. I share the story with you to introduce the idea that despite the fragile nature of trust, there are four steps you can take to establish and maintain trust (at work or home).

• Understand the nature of trust
  
• Appreciate the high cost of low trust
  
• Assess trust on your team
  
• Tackle your top trust-busters

Understand the Nature of Trust
To build trust, we must first define it. Trust is the decision to be vulnerable to the actions of others, based on our expectations they will perform a particular action. A careful reading of this definition reveals that the nature of trust:

• Asks us to choose to rely on others. To trust or not to trust is a choice.
  
• Puts us at risk. Without vulnerability, trust is not needed.
  
• Involves our prediction about the behaviors of others.

To further understand the nature of trust we must also realize that there are four categories of trust within any organization¹:

1. Strategic: Is there confidence that senior management is setting the right direction?
   
2. Organizational: Can employees rely on the organization itself?
   
3. Personal: Do employees have confidence in their manager?
   
4. Team: Is there trust among members of a team?

If any one of these takes a hit, it often damages the others. This brief article will help you build team trust.

Appreciate the High Cost of Low Trust
Professor Robert Hurley from Fordham University surveyed 450 leaders from 30 global companies and found that half of them didn't trust their senior executives.² Another survey of 12,750 U.S. workers at all job levels and in a variety of industries came to these conclusions:

• 39% of employees at U.S. companies trust their senior leaders.
  
• 45% of employees say they have confidence in the job being done by senior management
  
• 43% of employees say they trust the way their company manages change (e.g., restructuring, downsizing, merging, expansion and growth).³

This epidemic of low trust infects employee morale, retention, recruitment, productivity, sales, customer service, product quality, and the long-term financial performance of the organization.

Failure of team members to trust each other is especially problematic in today’s increasingly interdependent work environment. Although matrix management (where employees report to more than one boss) may offer benefits in this environment, there are several potential disadvantages of the matrix approach. These include heightened conflict, power struggles, and slower decision-making.⁴ If team members do not have the trust needed to combat these matrix challenges, the matrix structure becomes a spider web – attractive from a distance, a trap in practice.⁵

Low levels of trust also have profound implications for senior leaders of organizations. When Professors Tony Simons and Randall Peterson studied 100 CEOs and executive teams, they found the teams whose members distrusted one another were less effective in collaborating and endorsing strategic decisions.⁶ No wonder the bible teaches that "a house divided against itself cannot stand."

Assess Trust on Your Team
The survey below assesses overall team trust by asking you to indicate the extent with which team members act in the manner described by the question. Although there may be differences among team members, this assessment asks you to consider the general tendency among all members. There are five response options for each question.

• Never = 1
• To a Small Extent = 2
• To a Moderate Extent = 3
• To a Large Extent = 4
• Always = 5

Read each question and decide which one of the five responses best describes the extent with which most team members behave.

Overall, to what extent do you think team members...

1. Willingly share information, ideas, and suggestions with other team members?
   
2. Engage in cognitive/task conflict as needed, while minimizing emotional conflict?
   
3. Employ a quality, transparent, and collaborative process when making team decisions?
   
4. Manage the tension between self-interest and the organization’s interest well?
   
5. Act in a manner that is congruent with their words?
   
6. Provide honest, open feedback even if it challenges the prevailing point of view?
   
7. Manage their emotions well and respect the emotions of others?
   
8. Openly discuss challenges, knowing others will respond constructively and caringly?
   
9. Demonstrate their competence consistently as they fulfill their responsibilities?
   
10. Stay focused on key tasks and priorities?
     
    Score your team trust survey
     Scores 40 -- 50 = Team performs well most of the time.
     Scores 30 -- 39 = Team performs fairly well, except under pressure.
     Scores 20 -- 29 = Team performs poorly.
     Scores 00 -- 20 = Team does not perform.

Tackle Your Top Trust-Busters
How did your team do? Don’t be upset if they score poorly, the first step of any journey is to understand where you are -- to increase your awareness of your landscape.

If you read the 10 sentences in the above survey as statements instead of questions, you’ll know the top 10 keys to building and maintaining team trust. That’s right; the survey questions are also the answers to how to increase trust on your team. So, the next step is to try one of following three approaches to tackle your trust-busters.

1. Invite each person on your team to rate the overall team on these ten statements (like you just did). Then, have the team brainstorm ways they could improve the lower-scoring statements.
   
2. Rate yourself on these ten. Then, decide how you want to work on areas that need development.
   
3. Ask each team member to rate every team member. Then, tally the scores to gain an excellent idea of how each team member is perceived by all their peers.

I recently followed a variation of this third approach with an executive team. After reviewing their feedback with each of them during a one-on-one debriefing, each executive chose to work on his or her own trust issues. The CEO called last week to tell me how pleased he is with their progress.

Our willingness to trust others
is not always about the others.

I wish I could report that I used these ideas to build trust with the young professor at UCLA, discussed in the opening story. But I can't report it because I didn't do it. I didn't have the knowledge to build team trust. You do. Let me know how it helps you and your team.

Keep stretching when you're pulled,
Dave

^1. Robert Galford and Anne Seiblod Drapeau, The Enemies of Trust, Harvard Business Review, February 2003, 89
^2. Robert Hurley, The Decision to Trust, Harvard Business Review, September 2006, 55-62.
^3. WorkUSA 2002, Weathering the Storm: A Study of Employee Attitudes and Opinions, http://www.watsonwyatt.com/research/resrender.asp?id=W-557&page=1
^4. Mohammad El-Najdawi and Mathew Liberatore; Matrix Management Effectiveness: An Update for Research and Engineering Organizations, Project Management Journal, March, 1997, 25
^5. Thomas Sy; Stephane Cote; Emotional intelligence: A key ability to succeed in the matrix organization, The Journal of Management Development; Vol. 23, No 5, 2004, 437.
^6. Tony Simons and Randall Peterson, When to Let Them Duke It Out, Harvard Business Review, June 2006, 23-24.

P.S. Dave Jensen and his team transform proven leadership tools into your success stories. Dave is also a popular speaker at conferences, meetings, and workshops. He can be reached in Los Angeles, CA at (310) 397-6686 and http://davejensenonleadership.com/index.html