And how team training can help build and sustain this value.
Today, more than ever, there is a growing understanding that trust is a necessary, fundamental asset required for the transition from individual work to joint and collaborative work, which is required in a complex reality. Trust enables the deepening of teamwork, the promotion of commitment and connectedness, and in fact what makes it possible to cope with the endless change of the team, the organization, and the world around it.
You can learn more about exactly what team trust is, who it is for and how it works here .
When trust is present and present, people are willing to take a step forward and do the job in the best way possible, together and efficiently. They coordinate their actions according to the common goal, take risks with suggestions and thinking outside the box, speak openly and honestly, and move with the knowledge and feeling that they have backup and support.
When trust is lacking or undermined in relationships within a team and organization, people help each other only to achieve position and status, hoard information, keep cards close to their chest, act with great caution, and generally talk about people instead of with people.
It is clear that people need trusting relationships in the workplace in order to develop and advance. Although the importance, necessity, and demand of trust are clear to everyone, as is the cost of its absence, many managers and teams fail to achieve significant, long-lasting results.
Within and between coaching teams, as in all human relationships, trust can be built and trust can be broken or cracked. The fragility and vulnerability of trust must be understood and acknowledged so that the right steps can be taken to create, maintain, and restore it when needed. Trust is especially vulnerable during periods of rapid growth and change, in times of uncertainty, whether due to reorganization and personnel changes or complex periods such as the coronavirus, and whether it is the vulnerability that exists due to physical distancing built into virtual teams.
What can managers and leaders do to create broader trust during complex times, and how do you create a safe space in teams?
A safe space is built within a team or group organization. This means creating a space based on trust between all people, not just between individuals of any kind, but between the individual and the group as a whole. A safe space allows the individual to dare and bring thoughts and ideas, knowing that the team is a safe place to dare, share, and make mistakes.
A safe space allows people to be curious, to experiment with new things, ideas, and thoughts, to collaborate in different ways and in other connections, thereby bringing solutions from other dimensions, other teams, and bringing innovation in the broadest sense of the word.
In many places, the culture of discourse does not allow for challenging the status quo, speaking painful truth, admitting mistakes and proposing new ideas, taking risks and trying new and challenging approaches. Without a safe space, or psychological safety in the workplace, individuals and teams cannot operate at their full potential. Safe space, psychological safety are an asset to the company in order to enable it to soar to extraordinary results.
A 2017 Gallup study found that three out of ten employees strongly agree that their opinions are not important in the workplace. When an employee experiences this, it is likely that at some point they will stop sharing their opinions or making suggestions. This means that 30 percent of the company’s thinking power is shut down.
How can managers and leaders work to create a safe space that will enable them to achieve extraordinary results?
1. Talk about exactly that! Emphasize the importance of a safe space and psychological safety as an asset that the company promotes and maintains in order to fulfill the vision. The importance of a safe space for creating commitment and connection of employees to the team and the organization, and the importance of including and sharing all voices.
2. Act with genuine curiosity and honesty as a personal example. Bring more patient listening to different opinions, give a platform to people who have more difficulty speaking in the common space, and allow the status quo to be challenged without being intimidated.
3. Create norms that encourage learning and experimentation and the proper management of failures and risk-taking. Create a safe, non-punitive learning space.
4. Create a space that allows for the bringing and expression of new and different ideas. Enable creative and bold discourse in order to promote boundary-breaking thinking.
5. Allow and embrace conflicts and create enabling discourse and constructive communication out of differences and disagreements.
And yet the responsibility for creating a safe space does not only lie with managers but also with team members and employees in the organization. After all, we all create “this is how it is accepted here”…and therefore we can all change it. How do we do that? For example:
1. Active listening and asking open-ended questions
2. Seek partnership in failures and mishaps, just as in successes, and see this as an opportunity for shared learning.
3. Bring more honesty to the conversation to express both gratitude and disappointment
4. More openness to asking for help and giving help
5. Develop a perspective that sees the different qualities that each person has to bring to the common basket instead of a view of singular heroes with virtues.
6. Create an encouraging atmosphere that connects people and creates an experience of partnership and teamwork.
One of the powerful processes that enables collaborative work to create a safe and enabling space is team trust. In the process of team coaching, we accompany the team and work together on communication at a different level, a deeper understanding of connectedness and partnership, and creating a different discourse that builds the team and allows the team to build itself in order to achieve a good emotional experience of partnership and extraordinary results.
