How to build trust in your team
A collection of practical tools
“Teams succeed because they are exceedingly human” Patrick Lencioni
Introduction: a bit of background
I’ve been leading people and teams for nearly 25 years. In that time, I’ve worked with CEOs, Chairs, boards, parliamentary committees, and executive teams in the charity, public, and private sectors (FTSE 100).
In 2019, I wrote about the benefits of creating a team environment where everyone expresses their views freely and where you can disagree well, and about how to encourage healthy conflict in a team.
I cautioned then that before you launch into deliberately encouraging conflict in a team, you need to start by building trust, because trust is the foundation for effective team work.
For a team to be effective, you need people to trust each other, and to be ready to open up and be vulnerable in front of each other. This level of trust requires an inclusive culture, where there is psychological safety and people feel that their contribution will be heard.
So I started to write this post on how to build trust in a team.
Over time, I would add to the draft, but I never finished it off. With a background in academic research, I’m someone who can like to go deep on a subject. So I felt that there was more I wanted to read on the topic before I finished the post, more things I wanted to test and experiment with. Which meant that the post languished in my draft folder.
But the other day, a colleague who I value a lot asked me:
“Quick one - do you have any favourite actvities when it comes to building trust in a team with low psych safety?”
Now whilst that question doesn’t meet my criteria for being a “quick one” (!), in my draft post I could at least find some answers, some examples of activities I had tried and tested. And reading the draft again, I realised that I already had more than enough material to publish it. So, given I’m trying to get better at following the 80:20 principle, here it is.
Why does Trust matter?
Why is trust important for team performance?
For me, Trust enables each of us to reach more of our potential and get closer to being the best version of ourselves. Trust is essential for open communication (eg about our strengths, weaknesses and mistakes), which is crucial for collaboration and shared accountability, which we need for a team to perform at a sustainable high level.
For Patrick Lencioni, trust is the foundation of team performance (or at the root of a dysfunctional team):
Similarly, Stephen Covey argued that “most organizational performance issues are actually trust issues in disguise.” He claimed that, because “work gets done with and through people, there is nothing more impactful on people, their work, and their performance than trust”:*
“People who are trusted rise to the occasion and perform better, then turn around and give trust to others, creating a virtuous upward spiral of trust and confidence. And if a company can successfully achieve a high-trust culture, it will climb in every measure.”*
Therefore, establishing trust and being trusted is particularly important for leaders, since as a leader, “your influence on others is in direct proportion to how much they trust you.” So, because leaders deliver results through others, trust is necessary for a leader to have impact and influence:
What even is Trust?
Of course, as with any word, ‘trust’ means different things to different people. In her article ‘What is trust, really?’ summaries a few different definitions of what people mean by Trust.
For example, Lencioni distinguishes between what he calls ‘predictive trust’ and ‘vulnerability-vulnerability-based trust’.*
‘Predictive trust’ is the expectation that individuals will do what they say they will. You build it when your actions align with your stated intentions, through consistent behavior and reliability. ‘Vulnerability–based trust’ arises when people are open and honest with one another.
Personally, my favourite definition of trust is encapsulated in the ‘trust equation’ by Charles H. Green:
The equation illustrates that trust is based on perception. It also highlights that the extent to which one person trusts another person depends on four variables:
- Credibility = whether you perceive the other person as credible (as in, how I perceive their competence/capability in relation to what they are doing or saying, eg Do I trust what they say on a given topic?),
- Reliability = whether you perceive the other person as reliable (eg Do I trust that they will do what they say they will do?),
- Intimacy = whether you perceive that it is safe to entrust someone with information about myself (eg How willing am I to reveal to them my vulnerability, doubts, or feelings? Do they know me the human being? Or just some work caricature of me? Do they care about me and my well-being? Will they be 100% candid with me, and vice versa?), and
- Self-Orientation = whether you perceive that someone’s focus is primarily on themselves or on others (eg Do they care for others, or do I perceive them as looking out for their own interests? Stephen Covey calls this last quality ‘intent’. A person assessing your intent will wonder, ‘Are you thinking about yourself, or others, in this situation?’*)
I like this definition for two main reasons.
First, I find it simple to use as a diagnostic:* to reflect on why people in a particular situation/relationship may or may not trust one other by considering each of the variables.
Second, I find it practical and actionable. That is, by exploring questions related to each variable you can identify practical steps to foster trust. Ask yourself, for instance: ‘What can I do to increase my credibility?’ ‘What can I do to demonstrate that I am reliable?’ and ‘How can I build intimacy with this person?’
So how do you build trust?
Well, I’ve seen lots of generic advice.
Here are some examples:
- Act with integrity
- Act consistently
- Admit mistakes
- Be authentic
- Be humble
- Be open
- Be vulnerable
- Be you
- Create transparency
- Develop emotional intelligence
- Develop empathy
- Don’t avoid issues (eg difficult decisions, poor performance)
- Don’t be judgmental
- Don’t over promise and under deliver
- Keep promises and commitments
- Lead by example
- Promote open communication
- Reduce gossiping
- Treat everyone with respect and fairness
- Walk the walk
Yes, sure. I don’t disagree with any of that. Sounds great. Those are excellent behaviours to promote, and I can see how they help to build trust. But… I find most of that advice pretty hard to action.
I’m looking for practical actions and activities: Deliberate activities we can do with teams to enable/encourage some of these positive behaviours and cultivate trust.
So that’s what I’m sharing here.
Each of the following trust-building activities I’ve either used myself, or someone who I trust has used them and reported that they were helpful.
I’ve grouped the activities into categories to help you select the right ones based on your team’s needs and context.
As I continue to experiment with new exercises, I’ll add here the ones that teams I work with find valuable. Because building trust requires constant attention.
“Trust is built in very small moments.”* John Gottman and Brené Brown
Activities to build personal connections & encourage vulnerability
The activities in this category encourage people to share personal stories and feelings, in order to build Intimacy as it’s defined in the Trust equation.
- Personal histories exercise
Have each team member answer a number of questions about their personal lives. Questions can include things like where you were born, your first job, worst job, number of siblings, greatest fear, or something that nobody else knows about you. Each person shares their answers to these questions with the rest of the team. This is a great way to start a team building day. Here are two specific examples of this exercise:
- Origins & influences — in this example, everyone is invited to draw (i) their origins, (ii) their influences, and (iii) what matters to them
(HT ) - Defining moments (HT Officevibe):
“Create a safe space to learn about your employees’ backgrounds and what has been vital in shaping their lives. Doing this as a group allows employees to learn new things about each other that otherwise might not come up, and the act of being open, honest and vulnerable is a great way to form bonds, increase empathy and improve relationships.
- Ask everyone to think about the three most defining moments in their lives and write them down on separate post-its.
- Have each employee present these moments to the team, and share their story to whatever degree they feel comfortable.
- Thank everyone for sharing and ask the team to share what their takeaways are from the exercise.”
- Check ins:
We all have lives and experiences outside work that shape the way we feel, and therefore perform at work. Understanding how people feel at the start of a meeting, with a question that sets a tone of openness and vulnerability, will bring empathy to the fore, enabling Intimacy.
One example is ask everyone to share three things:
1) A recent personal joy
2) A current professional challenge
3) A current personal challenge
Another is to ask everyone to finish this statement: ‘If you really knew me, you’d know that…’
- No phones:
Ask people to put their phones away in meetings. Indeed, I often ask people to put away all devices. This is because, as Frances Frei says in her TED talk on how to build trust, the smartphone is “the largest distraction magnet yet to be made, and it is super difficult to create empathy and trust in its presence.”
A direct approach:
Sometimes it’s helpful to address an issue by subtle or indirect means.
And sometimes, it’s good to address it head on.
Pam Bilbrey from the Table Group explains this exercise: “Trustworthiness is in the eye of the beholder. It’s important for teams to understand the personal triggers that create a perception of trust and distrust among their colleagues. I often ask teams to participate in an exercise where each team member is asked to complete the following sentences:
- The fastest way to gain my trust is to…
- My trust in another person is instantly eroded when…
The insights gained in understanding how perceptions of trust are formed can be a significant step in moving the team to higher levels of trust.”
Tim Enwall explains how he uses a similar exercise with his leadership team:
“We identify, for each leader on the leadership team, which are the most important trust enablers [you can use the two sentences above for this, or the four components of the trust equation] and how are each of us, as colleagues, doing on the “trust meter” for that enabler? We go on walks to talk about these areas of trust. We check in with each other on how much trust we do/don’t have.”*
This one is a bit wildcard, which can also be a lot of fun. I like throwing the problem/question of how to build trust directly back at a team by using the one of these two exercises to ask the team ‘how could we create a culture of mistrust within our team?’ and let them loose on that!
Feedback, Recognition & Appreciation
- Team effectiveness exercise — creates a forum for team members to provide one another with focused, direct and actionable feedback about how their individual behavior affects and can improve the performance of the team.
- One thing
- Appreciation Circle
- Appreciation Train
- The Johari Window
Understand each other’s working styles and how to collaborate and work together effectively
- Use personality and behavioural preference profiles to build mutual understanding (eg MBTI, CliftonStrengths, Disc, Working Genius, LIFO — other models are available…)
- Build a team manual, or each develop a personal version and share them to help each others get the best from one another at work
- Establish team norms — principles for how to work together — and conduct regular reviews
- Create a Team Canvas
- Create a team capability comb by helping people describe and share their unique capability profile.
Work together
Any time you actually get to practice being a successful team, you re-enforce the trust and strengthen the foundation.
Most of the activities in this post are designed to enable/facilitate/accelerate an increase in Intimacy. That’s mainly because I see Reliability & Credibility in the trust equation as things that everyone has to take personal responsibility & accountability for.
Nonetheless, it is through a team working really hard together on something that they’re passionate about that trust is often formed. Through bumping up against each other on a piece of work, passionately disagreeing, and finding a way forward, people can form strong bonds of trust that you cannot replicate in an activity or exercise.
But I’ve four important riders here:
First, it can take a long time, and exercise like those in this article accelerate things. (And they’re not mutually exclusive — you can use these exercise before or during a piece of work.) Second, there’s no guarantee it’ll work: some people work together for a long time and never grow to trust one another. Third, it is possible to work together and effectively demonstrate Reliability and build Credibility whilst never developing Intimacy. And, fourth, people are different, and value different elements of the trsut equation differently,. So whilst some people place most importance on Reliability and build Credibility, for some other people sharing Intimacy is most important for building trust.
Social activities/gatherings
I’ve deliberately put this category of activities last because I often see extreme reactions to them. Some people dismiss them, downplaying their value, whilst other people overly rely on them and go no deeper in seeking to build trust in their team than to organize some drinks, or set up some expensive ‘team-building activity’. My view is not to overlook these things, whilst not looking to them alone to solve issues of trust.
- Play games together — board games, darts, football, rounders, fly a kite, it doesn’t matter, whatever works inclusively for you as a team.
- Eat together — There’s a reason why ‘breaking bread together’ has such a significant place in human cultures and history.
- Travel together — eg sit next to each other on trains, planes, etc. (Not my natural inclination personally, but opens up many opprtunities for building empathy and understanding that you’d otherwise miss.)
- Shared experience — eg Go to a concert or show together
And finally— Tips for Success:
- Choose activities appropriate to your team’s culture and comfort level (recognizing that sometimes there can be benefits from taking people/a team outside their comfort zone).
- Debrief afterwards to reflect on what you learned about trust.
- Don’t treat these as one-offs: Regularly incorporate trust-building activities into what you do with your team.
