Building and Maintaining Trust

“No quality or characteristic is more important [than trust]” - Patrick Lencioni

While trust is vital in any team, its importance is amplified in teams in which people are expected to think creatively, share information openly, and engage in honest dialogue. Productive discourse hinges on the trust shared between team members. Team members need to believe they can share their ideas and viewpoints, and freely critique others without fear of reprimand or concern for making mistakes. To do so means creating a climate that fosters a sense of psychological safety for team members.

The Commander and team leader have key roles in building and maintaining a climate of trust. These senior leaders can set the conditions for trust by creating an environment that is safe for critical thought and discourse. The Commander and team leader also have the capacity to dampen and jeopardize trust, though perhaps unintentionally. But it is important to recognize that responsibility for making the team “work and play well” together does not reside only with the Commander or team leader. Everyone on the team is responsible for how the team functions, including building trusting relationship. Establishing the notion that “everyone on the team is responsible for the team” is a key aspect of creating a productive, trusting environment for teamwork.

“A team must become a trust group in order for members to freely express their incomplete ideas, working hypotheses and emerging ideas. Creative productivity is greatest when team members can build on each others’ thinking without concern for making mistakes.”

(U.S. Army CIV)

Key Issues and Challenges

“When you are first coming to grips with the essence of the problem or trying to generate a solution... you need everyone’s mind and heart open (not to be too fuzzy). Once the mind or heart closes, or someone’s feelings are hurt, they will no longer help solve the problem.”

(U.S. Army LTC)

A significant obstacle to promoting a positive climate that encourages discourse is the military culture itself. Military personnel have been conditioned to conform to the military’s hierarchical command structure -- to follow orders and to expect orders to be followed. The military’s culture has evolved in this way for good reason, and has served the military and our country well. But it has its costs. If the planning team operates using standard military modes of interaction, members of the team who are more junior may feel a degree of risk and discomfort in actively questioning assumptions and prevailing perspectives of those in higher ranks.

An additional obstacle is the time and opportunities for interaction that building trust requires. In certain circumstances individuals may be working with team members whom they already know and trust. But in other cases individuals will likely be working with team members for the first time. Having the necessary time and shared experiences for building trust can be particularly challenging when the team is operating under time constraints with limited opportunity to develop relationships. This is often the case with ad-hoc teams who convene quickly for purposes of crisis response. Fortunately, there are ways to accelerate the development of trust. We describe some tips and strategies for doing so in the next section.

Finally, incorporating external subject matter experts (SMEs) into the team can create challenges to building and maintaining trust within the team. The team may choose to involve individuals who have important expertise relevant to the problem set the team is engaging. These SMEs may come from military or non-military organizations and agencies with differing agendas, different organizational cultures, differing views of the military, and different norms for interacting and conducting business. All of these differences have the potential to create challenges to trust-development and information-sharing within the team (See Managing the Team).

Tips and Things to Consider

The following tips and strategies used by planning team leaders and members can help to build and maintain trust within the team.

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Consider engaging in trust- and team-building activities at the outset of the team interaction (Expand)

Experienced planning teams have used a variety of practices to build and maintain trust. The practices viewed as most effective are those that focus on clarifying roles, building interpersonal relationships, and setting goals. The methods can be relatively simple to implement. Some examples include:
- Personal story-telling, which involves having each team member describe his/her background and experiences to the rest of the team. A number of different queries can be used to elicit the information (Note). The exercise can take the form of a tabletop discussion or it can be expanded to include pictures, graphics, or whiteboard sketches while describing one’s personal story. Use of visual imagery is a way to simultaneously foster creative thought and get team members into a visual thinking mode. (Background Exploration Exercise).
- Role-clarification exercises allow team members to describe, discuss, and clarify what they bring to the team. It provides an opportunity for members to think about and explicitly describe how they view their role(s) on the team, given what they understand about the team’s goal and their own skills, strengths, and experiences. It also provides an opportunity to highlight and de-conflict areas in which the team leader or other team members may see an individual’s role differently, or see a connection between some aspect of their personal history and the team’s mission. (Starter questions).
Many other exercises have been developed specifically for building trust within a team. For other example activities, see the Tools and Resources tab.

Consider rotating leadership and/or facilitation of discourse sessions (Expand)

The simple act of sitting down (or letting go of the whiteboard marker or computer), and letting members take over gives permission for team members to share ownership of the team, and contributes to building confidence and trust.

Invite critique (Expand)

Explicitly invite disagreement and alternative points of view from the team members. For example, a team leader who was viewed as particularly effective and trusted by his team explicitly encouraged critical thought from his team members by saying things such as:

- “Somebody challenge me on my assertion.”
- “Who at the table disagrees with this?”
- “Where does my idea break down? What factors am I missing?”

“When the leader sits down and allows others to pick up the marker and write on the board, or allows someone else to speak without interruption, condemnation, or condescension - others feel like they can contribute and will.“

(U.S. Army LTC)

While many successful teams appoint a particular individual to serve in the role of “devil’s advocate,” inviting push back from all team members provides an opportunity to get a broader array of countering viewpoints from multiple team member perspectives.

Express trust in the team (Expand)

Successful team leaders have found that affirming their trust in individuals and in the team with statements such as, “I trust you” or “I have faith in your judgment” can be a powerful practice. The simple expression of confidence in teammates can engender trust.

Provide opportunities for social interaction (Expand)

Social events can be used as an opportunity for team members to know one another on a more personal level as well as provide a needed reprieve from intense research and discourse sessions. (See Managing Team Workflow and Productivity). However, team members should not be mandated to attend such events, as this could backfire on the trust-building intent.

“I didn’t do a good job of mixing in social things….like, “let’s go out to lunch.” I think it would help to create a better dynamic in managing tensions…. There’s no reason we can’t have a discourse session over beer.”

(U.S. Army LTC)

Exploit break times (Expand)

Breaks provide opportunities for team members to talk about the issues they are addressing in an informal way. Not only do team members get to release tension and recharge, they also get to know each other. One design team leader usually suggests that his teams break for a cup of coffee about once an hour.

Facilitate relationship-building when bringing in new members (Expand)

New team members might be added to the team as a replacement for a current team member, or on a temporary basis – such as when external SMEs are brought in for a finite period. Experienced team leaders found it helpful to discuss the addition of new team members with the core team ahead of time. Introduce the new person to the team by describing the new member’s background and the skills and expertise they bring. Consider a version of the “personal story-telling” activity that provides the new team member an opportunity to tell the team a little about him/herself and vice-versa.

Recognize the importance of maintaining trust (Expand)

While attention is often given to trust-building activities, maintaining trust or rebuilding trust when it has been damaged are equally important considerations. Re-building trust once broken is different (and often much more difficult) than building and maintaining it. If trust is damaged (e.g., if a discourse session breaks down into personal attacks), it can take significant effort and time to mend. Thus attention to maintaining trust is important. A few tips for supporting the maintenance of trust in the team are offered next.
- Invite all team members to continuously monitor the level of trust within the team. Discuss the importance of trust in the team and recommend that each member take ownership of trust issues in the team. Invite members to monitor trust relationships across the entire span of the team’s lifecycle and to actively note or engage the issue when breakdowns are imminent.
- Conduct periodic internal evaluations to evaluate the level of trust within the team. These evaluations can occur as a discussion-based team activity, or with individual team members. Some team leaders described using self- and peer team evaluations conducted by an outside facilitator. These outside facilitators can provide anonymous feedback and constructive recommendations for improved interaction.
- Consider activities for providing constructive feedback to team members. For example, after working together for a sustained period of time, some planning teams have found it helpful to discuss the key strengths and “derailers” for each person on the team. In other words, what does the member bring to the team that offers the greatest benefit? And what does the member bring that could potentially derail the team?

Tools and Resources

This section provides a set of tools and resources to supplement the topics covered in the “Building Trust and a Team Identity” module. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list of resources, but provides a starting point for planning teams engaged in activities to build trust and develop a shared team identity. The material is organized into the following sections: 1) team exercises, and 2) suggested reading.

Team Exercises

Background Exploration Exercise [PDF]
Description: Provides an opportunity for team members to learn about each other’s unique skills, experiences, and perspectives through sharing of experiences and backgrounds with the team.

Scenario Training for Agile Teams (STAT) [PDF]
Description: A process and set of tools that helps team members get to know one other and rapidly develop into an effective team through discussion of realistic scenarios.

Elevator Pitch – Role Play [PDF]
Description: An exercise that helps teams consider and articulate their team’s purpose or reason-for-being in just a few sentences.

MAKING SENSE OF COMPLEX PROBLEMS

Building and Maintaining Trust

Key Issues and Challenges

Tips and Things to Consider

Tools and Resources

Team Exercises

Suggested Readings