Choosing To Trust, part 1
In his landmark 2002 book The Five Dysfunctions Of A Team, Patrick Lencioni defines the foundational dysfunction of unhealthy teams as a lack of trust. Put simply, teams that trust each other are more likely to be successful, and stay together longer, than teams that don’t. You have likely experienced the dynamics of teams that trust and teams that don’t, and already know this to be true. When teams trust each other, they believe the best, but when they’re suspicious they believe the worst. Both tend to be self-fulfilling prophecies.
What may not be as obvious is the fact that your team has a great deal of control over its levels of trust and suspicion. One of the first steps toward building trust is realizing the dynamic that is present on your team (and every other). Here are three things that help explain why our interactions serve to raise or lower our trust level:
You never know the whole story about anyone other than you.
Part of having discernment is being able to make decisions based on a small amount of data using our past experiences as a reference. But this is also dangerous territory for us, because your past experience with someone else doesn’t necessarily predict your teammates’ actions or motives. We have all underestimated and overestimated others. We mistake the shy person for being aloof, the friendly person for being a true friend, and the quiet person for being weak. One of the most significant leaders I’ve met was quietly working to reform the prison system in an entire state, yet most people who meet him have no idea what he is up to. Some wealthy people wear overalls, some people with expensive cars are broke, and some of your assumptions about your teammates are wrong. It’s best to remember that you don’t always know the whole story, and if you did you might see the situation differently than you do.
There are gaps in our relationships, at home and at work.
Because you don’t know the whole story, the parts that are unknown to you create gaps in your knowledge. Every relationship has gaps, it’s just a question of what you do with them and how you fill them in. When you trust someone, it’s amazing how your trust turns into what you know: “I know they would never do that to me.” We have an innate tendency to fill the gaps with something, usually based on our past experience with this particular person (or even with others). As our teammates establish a track record with us, we tend to default toward trusting them because we have “learned” what they will or won’t do to us. But the truth is, when you’re unsure of whether you can fill the gap with trust it’s better to actively choose to leave it blank than default to suspicion.
Gaps are the space between what you expected and what you experienced.
Why did they come in late? Why did they say or do that? Why didn’t they come to my defense? Why haven’t they returned my email/phone call/text? What did they mean by that? These common team-dynamic questions are focused on our expectations of others. As in our marriages and friendships, unmet expectations can be land mines if not properly dealt with. One way to lower your stress level is to ask if your expectations are realistic. Would they sound reasonable if you expressed them to others? Do you mentally allow for the fact that sometimes people don’t immediately answer email or texts, or their phone died, or they had car trouble or a sick child? Is there a reasonable explanation for why your experience fell short of your expectation?
In part 2 we'll look at how to proactively give trust to our teammates as an investment in our culture.
This 2-part series of posts is taken from training content offered by MLC called “Choosing To Trust”, which also includes discussion questions and personal exercises. Contact us for more information.
