To the casual observer, a high-performing team can look almost effortless, with a sense of collaboration and cohesion, ease and authenticity that just clicks. Every person understands their role, the goal and is fully engaged in the ongoing success of the business.
But achieving this status doesn’t happen by happy accident, if anything it takes as much work as the “day job”.
So what if we applied the same strategy, research and analysis to optimising the operation of our teams as we do to the service of our clients? How would that look?
Goldcrest Partners co-founder Tim McEwan draws on his experiences of teamwork during his career in the British Army to highlight 7 conditions that he believes are essential to success and take away the guesswork.
The model offers a systemic framework to create the conditions that pull together individual brilliance into collective power, allowing each team to define for itself what high performance looks like for them and the journey to get there. As a process, it’s intensive but the results are compelling.
This will be a series of 7 insight pieces, starting with Trust which you can read below.
Trust
We perform well perform because we trust each other. We trust each other’s alignment to our shared goal. We trust each other’s commitment to work hard. We trust each other’s skill and ability. We trust each other to look out for each other. We trust each other to hold each other to account.
Trust is essential to any high-performing team, and many of the most serious challenges to effective team functioning derive from its absence. Patrick Lencioni’s seminal work The Five Dysfunctions of a Team places trust at the foundation of a functional team for good reason.
By its very nature trust is something to be granted rather than made. We cannot insist someone trusts us but we can inspire the conditions under which they may chose to have faith in our trustworthiness. The same is true within teams. Trust within a new team needs to built. It can only be based on exchanges completed. Over time it evolves and develops, is galvanised by shared experiences, wins and losses. Teams are rarely static and the high-performing team is critically aware of the varying trust capital within the group as members change, relational bonds tear and repair, and reputations are built.
Effectiveness of action is critical to high performance and trust is a crucial to enable this. When a high trust environment exists within a team, the division of labour can be clearer because there is confidence in the reliability of others to perform their roles. When we trust fellow team members word and deed, it allows us to focus on our own parcel of activity without double guessing and inefficiency.
Over time, most of us have developed the critical capacity to evaluate the triggers, cues and data to help us decide whether to trust or not trust. This becomes stretched when we encounter novel situations and a high-performing team is able to calibrate the context much more quickly and accurately than an individual.
In its essence, trust exists when we can reliably predict the behaviour of something or someone (including ourselves). Recognising the value of trust and how to cultivate it to create a high-performing team is a vital first step in achieving team goals.
