Topics: Teamwork

Within a team, trust is characterised by a mutual understanding and knowledge of each member’s skills and abilities. Crucially, that involves knowing what other team members can and cannot do. For that reason, it is a purely neutral concept that can be earned through shared experiences among team members. Over time, a person’s belief and trust in another team member’s abilities can change and evolve, based on new evidence and behaviour.

Trust is essential to any high performing team. Patrick Lencioni’s seminal work “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” places trust at the foundation of a functional team for good reason. Many of the most serious challenges to an effective team functioning optimally derive from its absence.

But the formation of trust is a complex and gradual process, established through ongoing interactions. By its very nature, it is something to be granted rather than made during those interactions. Individuals cannot insist someone trusts them. However, individuals can establish the conditions, which make them more trustworthy.

The same is true within teams. Instilling trust within a new team demands proactive encouragement. Largely based on exchanges between team members, over time it evolves and develops. It is galvanised by shared experiences, wins and losses. Teams are rarely static and the high performing team is critically aware of the varying 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 crucial to enable this.

When strong trust 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 implicitly, it allows us to focus on our own activity without double guessing and inefficiency. It means we don’t have to seek assurance, as we simply know and trust how another team member will perform.

It is vital, though, to dispel misconceptions about instilling trust. It should not be mistaken for blind faith. It must be justifiable either to demand it or extend it. Trust must be given and earned appropriately, but it must also be given genuinely and sincerely.

Over time, most people will have developed the critical capacity to evaluate the triggers, cues and data to help decide whether to trust or not trust. However, this becomes more difficult when we encounter novel situations. Conversely, though, a high performing team is able to calibrate the context much more quickly and accurately than an individual.

Goldcrest Partners can help your team become capable of navigating and interpreting trust with other team members. With our experience of improving team performance, we can support leaders striving to establish a better environment for trust to flourish – at pace.

Given the benefits that can be reaped when trust is strong within a team, it can be one of the most significant actions a leader can make. 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.

At its essence, a high-performing team is one where the whole is more than the sum parts.

But achieving this status doesn’t happen by happy accident and requires dedicated attention.

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, using his experiences of teamwork during his career in the British Army, has identified 7 conditions that he believes are essential to success. They are:

Altogether, the conditions offer a systemic framework to pull together individual brilliance into collective power, allowing each team to define for itself what high performance looks like and the journey to get there. As a process, it’s intensive, but the results are compelling.

To begin implementing the high performing team framework, read our series of pieces exploring each condition, starting with trust – which you can read here.

Continuous learning refers to an ongoing process of acquiring and evolving knowledge, skills, and behaviours before finally applying that knowledge. It involves harnessing the innate human capacity to learn and adapt – which is why it can be so useful within a professional context.

High performing teams are the ones which are able to create the right conditions in which learning can take place. It isn’t that they are better learners or have a bigger thirst for knowledge. Instead, they simply set up the environment which they know is advantageous for learning from both successes and failures.

In sub-optimally performing teams, the constraints of work often mean that employees do not, and cannot, learn from the past – whether that means taking on board why something was successful or why something went badly wrong. To rectify that, these teams need to recognise looking back at past activity, in a constructive manner, will enhance their future performance through learning. Previous experiences should then become the natural stepping stones to progressive success.

In addition to creating an environment which encourages learning, the best teams have the ability to move forward by analysing what happened in the past. To enable that analysis, a team must have a high level of trust and mutual understanding between members. It is a vital factor when exploring mistakes and successes. For example, think of a hospitality company running a conference which involves a number of stakeholders, all with different levels of knowledge. To put the conference on so it runs smoothly, all team members must draw from their previous knowledge of running past events, and know where to ask questions to learn when they are unsure.

When trust and mutual understanding are present, it allows each and every team member the freedom to share their own perspective. Crucially, it lets them do so without subjecting themselves or others to undue criticism. As with encouraging an environment that can withstand healthy conflict, a team that has plenty of trust and respect allows a better degree of depersonalisation so that learning can go beyond surface level.

Learning, therefore, enables moving on and forward. Another way to further encourage a healthy learning environment where people actively seek to improve, is having alignment behind the team’s vision – another condition to a high performing team. Learning leads to knowledge, and it is the application of this knowledge, to hit that vision, which is the indicator of a team continuously learning and seeking to improve.

Learning, though, isn’t merely a retrospective look at previous actions and practices. It’s also taking a proactive approach (by the whole team) to learn new skills and see that a team’s strength lies in their collective whole. Having this ability – to question, understand, and respond – is the calling card of a high performing team.

In the pursuit of continued learning within a team, it’s vital to understand that learning is not simply giving a team carte blanche to cast blame. Nor is it just providing a platform to sing a person or team’s praises. It has to have purpose and subsequent action. Plus, learning is not an end point. Learning has to be continual and it must also be applied. Knowledge without application is useless.

At Goldcrest Partners, we can help ensure that your team is always learning and looking to improve in the most constructive ways possible. We work with leaders and teams to support their journey to optimal productivity, for which learning from the past and learning in the present is central to future success. Call us today so we can help you and your team.