Contrary to common belief, hiring top talent as a team building strategy isn’t a guarantee for top performance. Highly skilled individuals can help drive strong performance, but delivering consistently exceptional results requires more than just collecting experts together. It requires trust.
Let’s start with what I mean by “team.” I’m going to lean on the definition presented in The wisdom of teams:
“A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.”1
Katzenbach and Smith allude to the need for trust throughout the book. Many of their stories and examples are underpinned by trust amongst the protagonists, though not always explicitly labeled “trust”:
“What sets apart high-performance teams, however, is the degree of commitment, particularly how deeply committed the members are to one another… Each genuinely helps the others to achieve both personal and professional goals.”2
Patrick Lencioni calls out trust explicitly as the foundation required for effective teamwork in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. He argues that “absence of trust” is the most significant dysfunction and, without building trust, a team cannot thrive.3
Furthermore, there is an ever-growing body of literature supporting how critically emotional intelligence and trust affect the success or failure of a team:
“Study after study has shown that teams are more creative and productive when they can achieve high levels of participation, cooperation, and collaboration among members. […] Our work shows that three basic conditions need to be present before such behaviors can occur: mutual trust among members, a sense of group identity (a feeling among members that they belong to a unique and worthwhile group), and a sense of group efficacy (the belief that the team can perform well and that group members are more effective working together than apart).”4
So how does a leader build trust with their team? Lencioni presents the case for demonstrating vulnerability, which I think is the right approach. The exercise he gives in the book during the retreat in Napa5 is contrived and mechanical, but the underlying approach is sound. You must first show trust in others if they are to come to trust you and the other members of the team. Take real interest in them as a whole person, be appropriately vulnerable, and consistently demonstrate your trustworthiness. It takes time for trust to be earned. Only after you’ve fostered trust throughout the team is it possible to unlock the level of collaboration needed to consistently deliver exceptional results.
- Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith, The wisdom of teams : creating the high-performance organization, (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1993), 45. ↩︎
- Katzenbach and Smith, 65. ↩︎
- Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2002). ↩︎
- Vanessa Urch Druskat and Steven B. Wolff, “Building the Emotional Intelligence of Groups,” HBR’s 10 Must Reads On Teams, March 12, 2013 (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press), 100. ↩︎
- Lencioni, Five Dysfunctions. ↩︎