Trust Building in Teams
Building a team that is based on trust and interconnectedness is a strategy that promotes cohesiveness and the teams ability to function as a unit for the benefit of an organization. A team that lacks the basic necessities of team work or is lacking in the areas of the forming, storming, and norming stages will demonstrate an inadequate performance, whereas a team that encompasses the essence of effective team work will illustrate what progress can be achieved through a strong team dynamic. For instance, in sports, teams understand the severity of working together to achieve one main objective, "winning." A teams' fundamental mode of operations is to create a strategic action plan that immobilizes the opposition.
Steps to building trust and connection
- Develop a clear vision-A leader's responsibility is to ensure a team is on the same wavelength. Confusion is often eliminated if everyone within the team has a clear objective of what is expected. During the collaboration process of team building, the team must collectively narrow down how to get from point A to point B, and what unnecessary steps should be eliminated from the process. Once the vision is clearly identified, the team would be in a better position for fulfilling their objective.
- Encourage Commitment-one of the most difficult challenges of team work is getting team members to be committed to the teams' vision. There are many reasons a team member may not commit such as; fear of unknown variables, fear of added pressure or stress, not being able to deliver in a timely manner, or not at all. One way of encouraging commitment (from what I've learned) is to list each team members' skills and attributes, determine their strengths and weaknesses, and used your findings to your advantage. For instance, team members may not take the initiative to volunteer their services if they are uncertain of procedures, therefore if you are working towards making your team an aggressive competitor, than a team leader must rely on each members strengths in order to reach the desired outcome.
- Create a list of ground rules, productivity constraints, communication barriers, and possible alternatives to resolve conflict-I discovered that teams that are able to evaluate what makes them function as a cohesive unit and what may be a potential threat to future products are able to better understand the team processes and their current team members, this stage will enable the team to compromise and accommodate each team member.
- Effective communication-Communication must be practiced on a daily basis. During my professional experience I have worked with teams that practiced one-sided communication, and I have worked with teams that utilized effective communication practices, nevertheless, each team has yet to master the art of communication. Collectively, a team must encourage suggestions from all team members. There are teams that engross a top-down hierarchical approach in which case the leader expresses what the team is going to do, without consulting his/her members of what they think the best approach would be. Communication is only effective if the input from each member is considered.