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Wednesday May 11, 2011

Topic: Employee Management

Reference: Kayser, Thomas. (May 2011),”Building trust across teams.” SmartBlog on Leadership. http://smartblogs.com/leadership/2011/05/09building-trust-across-teams. Retrieved May 10, 2011.

The more interactions that you come across in your daily and work life, the more important trust factors become. Will you allow a contractor to work unsupervised in your home? On the youth basketball team, does the team trust the offense and personnel to run the plays?  At work, can you trust what co-workers tell you and are they reliable at pursuing and completing assignments?  As it turns out far to often the answers are at best insufficient or at worst absolutely not. The lack of trust intercedes into every conversation, gradually and consistently erodes confidence, and ultimately causes major breakdowns in production and productivity.  You can tell when trust is missing-there is a dual set of information; disclosures are misinterpreted and people wait until information is confirmed by a “reliable” source before any action takes place.  In the referenced article the commentator delves into the psychology of trust and sets out some key principles that should be followed in order to build trust and execution certainty. “Trust is the road over which everything else rides!” Without it you have completely dysfunctional teams.  Accordingly the commentator advocates the following: (1) negotiate realistic expectations; (2) share information so that team members understand their tasks and how they fit into the big picture;  (3) criticize constructively and avoid getting personal; (4) renegotiate commitments if circumstances change and you can’t finish your commitment; (5) bring potential solutions to the table not just problems.  This is an excellent set of guidelines and principles to use in building and maintaining trust. I really like bringing solutions to the table and not just problems. That does not happen often enough and chronic problem centered discussions serve to drain energy. Focusing on the solutions and not just the problems leads to many more problems being solved. Building trust around solutions is an ideal scenario and offers a significant return to your organization for investing in trust building. That is the right place to start to rebuild trust where it is lacking and to signal a new level of candor.  “Tell the truth-always; no sugar coating; no politics, no spin doctoring.” That is the road to travel to get you back to where you want to be as an organization.