In my recent post, on the specific type of trust leadership teams need, I shared why a key component of trust is having trust in the other person’s intention, and why this is so critical for leadership teams. Here we dig a bit deeper to look at 2 ways to build team trust.
Activity 1: Personal values
One of the first places to start with building trust is to help leaders see that the behaviour of others (and themselves) comes from a combination of their values (often shaped in childhood and by key life experiences) and their personality preferences.
Building trust can therefore be done by getting people to open up and share on both these fronts.
To get an executive team to share their values try this:
Exercise in vulnerability (light touch):
- Each team member picks a value that’s really important to them (try here for a list of values to choose from: https://www.viacharacter.org/character-strengths)
- Each shares a short story about how this showed up, or developed, as they were growing up.
- The leader goes first in this sharing exercise (and it’s always good to check that, as leader, you really are going to be role modelling trust and vulnerability).
This can be a fairly gentle exercise in vulnerability, a good starting point. It should feel a little uncomfortable, but not so much that people don’t want to do it.
Sometimes even this short exercise gets insights for the rest of the team about each other that they just didn’t have before.
Activity 2: Personality Preferences
There are a number of leadership profiling and 360 tools out there, and I use many of them for coaching, but building trust and vulnerability isn’t a coaching situation. So be careful not to introduce a coaching tool where the risk is that some team members have more development challenges than others, this is not the place for such a tool. You are going to want to pick a tool that shows behavioural or personality preferences in both a strengths and blind spots approach, one where each preference is equally valuable. You need to pick your tool carefully. My go-to tool for this specific need is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).
Through sharing their personality profiles team members can see that the reason others behave the way they do is simply a personality preference, they are not being difficult, obstructive or behaving a certain way on purpose.
And this is where the trust in intention comes in: “I now trust that you are not doing that to annoy me / piss me off / get in the way / be difficult….I understand why you are reacting and behaving that way.”
This enables team members to trust the intention behind another’s behaviour.
When we can trust the intention behind the other’s behaviours then we can more easily trust the person, and this enables us to be open to hearing them, even when what they say is challenging to us. Also, when we know that the other person will trust our intention, we feel more comfortable challenging and holding them accountable, without fear that the relationship will be damaged.
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