How Much Trust Exists in Your Leadership Team and With Your Organisation?
(90 seconds to read this article)
As CEO, creating a healthy and aligned leadership team is one of the most critical outcomes of our role. The single biggest barometer of team health is the level of TRUST held across the team.
Patrick Lencioni in his best-selling book “The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team”, clearly articulates how the absence of TRUST will inhibit the growth and the functioning of a high performance team. He deems this as the foundational piece from which team health is built upon. I agree with this, and in my corporate experiences and client growth advisory work, see team health and alignment as a major “lead indicator” for a successful and thriving business.
IF a team can create a genuine high-trust environment, it can then attempt to work through Lencioni’s 4 other dysfunctions (fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results). Success in each of these elements enables the rest of the organisation to reap the benefits of a healthy and aligned leadership team, that will be modelling a strong culture, producing a simple and easy to understand strategy, innovating ahead of the competition, and supporting the achievement of industry leading profitability (amongst other things!)
One of the challenges I see through my client work and presentations to CEO forums, is the major inconsistency in perspectives of CEOs versus their leaders/CXOs in assessing the levels of trust in their team. In the vast majority of occasions, I find that CEOs have a significantly higher opinion of TRUST present in the team than their team members…
On multiple occasions, I have been engaged into organisations where the CEO says that their culture and executive team health is “fine”. I’ll get a comment like, “we don’t need to work on that. We’ve been working together for years…” But, without even prodding too hard, there are almost always deep-seeded grievances that surface, levels of insecurity that stifle people from contributing, workplace communication styles that accidentally diminish (and even demoralize) team mates, and/or a level of reluctance to get in and support a struggling team mate.
If you’re trying to scale and optimize your business, sub-optimal TEAM TRUST will cause a lot of pain….
If you want to get a sense check on the TRUST ENVIRONMENT in your leadership team, and take some action to enhance it, I’d encourage you to take our simple TEAM TRUST APTITUDE ASSESSMENT as a team. Just follow 6 basic steps.
Good luck!!
Step 1: Ask your team (include yourself) to individually and independently assess the following TRUST statements contained in the table below.
Step 2: Have each team member individually score/record these using the 6 point scale below the table.
Step 3: Once all have completed this, populate the individual scores in the table provided and analyse the outcomes.
Step 4: Without blame or criticism, seek to understand the major differences in scores and perspectives, noting the key points and findings on a white-board/flip-chart. If done well, this will make for a rich discussion.
Step 5: With the aim of improving team health and TRUST, use the discussion points from previous steps to decide and commit to the following:
GROUP ACCOUNTABILITY: The 1 or 2 things you can do as a group to enhance TRUST in the team for the next quarter, and
INDIVIDUAL ACCOUNTABILITY: The 1 thing each of the leadership team members will commit to doing (themselves) that will enhance TRUST within the team. These individual actions (the who, the what, and the when) should be shared with the whole team.
(NOTE: You can also refer to Patrick Lencioni’s “Overcoming the five dysfunctions of a team – Field Guide”, to provide some potential actions to build trust and team health)
Step 6: periodically check-in and utilize this tool with your team.
TIP: To build TRUST across your whole organisation, 90 days after you’ve done this with your Leadership Team, have your CXO’s do the same exercise with their teams.