In 0.59 seconds, Google found ~2,810,000,000 URLs related to the word trust. Trust is spoken of so frequently that it’s a conversational catch-all with little meaning. For us, trust is a firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something. It’s what draws you to another’s thoughts, ideas, and beliefs – it’s what bonds you. Trust also enables debate, disagreement, and collective outcomes while keeping the relationship intact.
Leaders know trust is essential. Trust can increase effectiveness by a factor of 3. It empowers effective working relationships and fuels successful leadership teams and the meetings leaders run. Team meetings provide the primary arena where trust is built or eroded between leaders.
We trust leaders we’re close to; we’re close to leaders we trust. Teams whose meetings enable that type of ecosystem win. Yet, HBR authors’ recent study found 62% of respondents said meetings miss opportunities to bring teams closer together. If your meetings fail to create closeness, your team’s performance will gradually erode.
Team meetings require leaders to exhibit deep meaningful trust-based bonds for them to be worth your team’s time or your company’s resources. When those bonds are alive and active, meetings speed up decision making, strengthen linkages, unify direction, ensure commitment and accountability, boost engagement and morale, and create new innovative realities.
Edelman’s 2017 Trust Barometer research found that businesses, and indirectly team leaders, are uniquely positioned to reshape the global trust crisis. Findings suggest a shift in the traditional trust paradigm from being For the People to With the People. This participatory approach (see slide 50) is highlighted by player-coach leaders like Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison and exhibited in contemporaries like Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Kathleen Hogan. In a Forbes interview with Hogan, Carucci writes, “The Microsoft annual meeting used to be a global, five-day barrage of presentations ‘talking at’ people, but now it has been repurposed into…highly interactive product expos and learning sessions.”
I recently talked with a sales leader who illustrated his boss’ ability to leverage a participatory approach that strengthened closeness and trust. His leader was positioned to make some key asks of more senior leaders and a “yes” to any one of them would significantly aid the team’s success. At first, his leader led with what his asks would be – he gave them the answer. His team pushed back, “It’s not clear what you’re asking for.” The dynamic became participatory and stayed there for a while. “We went around and round but eventually landed on an ask that was better than any of us originally brought to the meeting.”
Leading that level of connection can be exhausting, however the payoff is clear. It doesn’t happen overnight. It’s practiced between you and built over time. Use team meetings to require and practice participation amongst your members. Use your meeting design and agendas to necessitate trust-based teaming.
Increase your collective knowledge of each other.
Know the uniqueness of each member and lead them accordingly – there’s always more to learn about the people you lead. What engages and motivates one of your leaders may cause another to shut down. Closeness and trust are predicated on knowledge – what we know about our leaders and what they know about us. Knowledge isn’t enough though; to lead with them you must act on what you know.
Practice: Reflect on the uniqueness of each team member. In one or two sentences capture what you believe makes them unique. If that’s difficult, ask a few questions to help you get to know them better. Be curious and go learn firsthand.
Once you have a few reflections for each team member, ask them to answer the questions individually. Then, compare and discuss your answers in a 1:1 setting. Pick one thing you can do to lead with them more.
Do this as often as you can. Discuss insights with the larger team. Normalize the idea that continued success happens when you act on the ever-growing knowledge of each other.
Require members to create value between each other during meetings.
Stop wasting time on report outs. Start using your time to do the work that creates value among you. The run rate to bring your team together requires that information sharing happens as prework in preparation for the work you’ll do together. Closeness and trust are built on collaborations that realize the unique value multiple leaders bring to the table.
Practice: If you haven’t already, identify your team’s top priorities for the year. Then identify the people, processes, and technologies that need to work well for your team to realize those priorities. Use team meetings to answer the follow questions for your team’s top three priorities. Then use a portion of your meetings to do the work.
1) What is the unique value we must create together?
2) What is the work to create that value?
3) Who and what must be involved to realize that value?
4) How will we work together to accomplish it?
5) What will indicate we achieved it?
Normalize psychological safety and ensure diversity, inclusion, and equity.
Google’s team research found psychological safety to be the lynchpin dynamic that ensured members took risks without feeling insecure. Psychological safety is created when leaders respond with curiosity, intrigue, patience, and genuine interest to thoughts, ideas, and actions that are different from their own. Your leaders are not afraid of being different, they are afraid of being marginalized when they lead with it. A psychologically safe team environment exists when leaders freely express diverse, contradictory points of view yet stay in the conversation even when their point of view isn’t acted upon.
Practice: You can measure the psychological safety of your team and should. You can also ask members a few simple questions to gauge their feelings and how to make the environment safer.
- Are you able to bring your full self to our team? Do you find yourself editing or withholding your thoughts and ideas? Why?
- What’s one idea you have withheld that could make our team more effective or our work more valuable? How would you start working on it?
- What can I do as leader, or can we do as a team, to ensure we get all of you?
Then, look for patterns and insights across the findings, discuss them as a team, and determine a few actions you can take at your next meeting to realize the benefit of your evolving environment. Warning: if you ask and don’t act on what you learn it will increase any existing feelings of a psychologically unsafe team environment.
Use your teaming context to gauge and develop members’ effectiveness outside your team.
To be successful, closeness and trust must extend beyond the walls of your meeting. How your team interacts with one another will be the way they team up with clients and customers. As lead, help members make the connection between team dynamics and individual effectiveness beyond your team. Meetings create an opportunity to model, reflect, and develop the skills, knowledge, and experiences that will enable them to win with their clients and customers.
Practice: Dynamics are constantly unfolding during team meetings and the first thing you need to do as team lead is be its master observer. Capture observations of ineffective team dynamics, specifically what happened and how it was ineffective. Stop the meeting in real time, name what’s happening and the impact it is having and discuss alternatives. Next, use your position as lead to be curious about how the dynamic hinders or could hinder effectiveness with clients or customers.
There doesn’t have to be an explicit connection so be cautious about declaring one. However, there might be a connection and it’s worth your time to explore it as a group. If possible, work to agree on a team commitment to safeguard the dynamic from happening again.
The foundation for the team members’ business acumen and technical expertise are the relationships they create with others. In all arenas, strong relationships bring leaders together and enable effective teaming. Relationships make or break the value that is created between them during meetings. You can have the world’s leading experts in your meetings but if you don’t have trust among them their expertise is meaningless.
As team leader you have the privilege and responsibility to ensure your team spends its time together effectively. Closeness and trust will help you do it when you meet. Your meeting design and agenda are your greatest tools to leverage. If you don’t design and use the time to strengthen your working relationships trust will not happen.