When a leader harbors negative expectations (distrust) that the team’s progress is likely to remain lackluster because of people or process problems, it’s time for a trust conversation. Opening up a trust conversation in a work team is more complex than with an individual because you’re sharing your concern among multiple people. You’re suggesting an opportunity for improvement, or even that an outright performance problem exists. That opinion might not be shared by others, particularly anyone who enjoys controlling the team’s work, so proceed carefully. Checking your assumptions, conclusions, and approach with a fellow team member or thought partner may help avoid missteps and ultimately assist you in building community around your team’s collaborative work.
As with individual trust concerns, it’s important that you be clear about the nature of the trust issue. What’s not working as well as it should? Could the cause of the problem be at the team level, a problem with how teamwork is conducted, or is it really a trust issue around one or more individual members? Taking time to think through your concerns about how the team functions related to trust is important. You want your leadership interactions with the team to be fruitful and to improve your team’s performance, so you don’t want to begin with an erroneous premise and diminish your chances for improvement.
To determine whether the root issue is at the team or individual level, consider Figure 2.
Team or Individual Trust Issue?
One indicator that your concern is a team trust issue is how the team conducts its meetings and monitors its operations. If the team’s meetings are unfocused and there never seems to be much progress made from meeting to meeting, you might point out that the team seems to have no common agreement on performance expectations. You’ll want to approach the topic clearly and cogently.
In approaching the topic of trust within a team, consider an opening such as:
• “I feel like we’re missing something important in how we’re doing our team work.”
• “I think we’re each approaching the team’s work with different priorities.”
• “There are some aspects of the team’s work that are working well and others that aren’t.”
• “I feel like we need to gain some clarity around team issues that are keeping the team from executing better.”