By Luba Diasamidze
Can trust improve your team’s connectedness, communication and performance? The answer is yes. Creating greater trust is directly connected to creating greater team results.
When we work with groups and teams, another concept comes up – psychological safety. Psychological safety includes trust as well as other beliefs about the team norms. The main difference is that trust is interpersonal (it’s how one person views another), and psychological safety describes the team climate – how we are viewed by the team/group, what expectations others in the group/team hold towards us. In a team, we may trust some people more than others (e.g. trust their ability to follow up on a promise or know they can show empathy). Psychological safety relates to the whole space – can I freely express my views and be accepted?
Why This Matters
I recently spoke with one of my clients in China at a business networking event. She is an advocate for people development. I’ve done multiple interventions for their company, including one-on-one coaching, team coaching and leadership development programs. After the event, we had a short conversation.
She said, “You know what’s interesting? None of the business owners I spoke with talked about people at all. They only talked about numbers, sales and KPIs.”
“I hear a lot of such conversations too,” I responded. “However, the numbers are done by people, right? The numbers are not created by themselves. It’s the people who create the numbers.” She agreed.
It’s important for number-driven managers to know that the role of trust is important, even from the functional point of view. When properly nurtured, it can directly affect business results. Teams function best when they have alignment with the processes and when there is buy-in with the processes. When people become disengaged, this affects KPIs. It negatively affects the numbers. It affects the deliverables. This is the path to nowhere. It’s a breeding ground for mediocrity and mindlessly going through the motions.
People want to be comfortable in the workplace. All managers want to work with people who care about their work. How about becoming a role model of showing care to your people?
Teams who have lower trust and psychological safety almost always underperform when compared to teams with high trust and psychological safety. Research shows that it positively influences work engagement and performance. Trust creates the phenomenon of “I hear you”. This is not about the sound waves. It is about truly getting and understanding a team member, on a head and heart level.
Can people really do their job fully, stay engaged and be fulfilled, if they are afraid to share their ideas? It’s doubtful.
If a team member is uncomfortable with a process, or if he/she doesn’t think the process is productive, it diminishes results. He/she might be thinking something like:
- I don’t think this decision is going to be beneficial for the team.
- I don’t think this route can get us to our KPIs faster.
- Why speak up? I don’t care and neither do they.
- Nobody appreciates my contributions and talents, so my opinion is not worth sharing.
- Last time I contributed, there was silence. I don’t want to feel embarrassed again.
- No matter what we say, it’s always the team leader who makes the final decision.
A level of trust and psychological safety are assets. They create employee engagement and improve motivation. They potentially lead to avoiding groupthink and allow people to really benefit from a variety of points of view. They foster an environment where critical and creative thinking are developed, and where everyone is interested in resolving the problem. The common scenario of “pick the first option” or “pick the easiest option” just to get the meeting over loses its influence.
Some Practices to Create a Psychologically Safe Space.
- Discover what trust means for each of the team members. One of the easiest ways to do this would be to ask each team member to share their list of behaviors that mean trust or lack thereof to them personally. You’d be surprised about all the diverse interpretations of trust. Every time I suggest this practice to teams I work with, they find it insightful. Some people feel most trusted when they are given a chance to mentor others, and others feel trusted when they are assigned challenging tasks.
- are on the same page.
- What are we really getting from this?
- I don’t see my purpose with this team or company. What should I do?
- How can I find (or
- Create a safe space. Lead by example. Normalize not always having the answer to a question. Accept every person’s contribution and effort, even when some assumptions may be wrong. Encourage others to show appreciation of teammates’ ideas.
- Adapt your practices. Help your team understand what kind of team they are. Some teams take it slow, while others race to where they need to be. One of the teams I coached decided to start with a “feedback & comments” box to develop a habit of sharing feedback with each other more often and more openly.
- Create team agreements. Discuss behaviors that you want to cultivate and behaviors that you want to get rid of. Some examples from my most recent team coaching engagements are:
- Every contribution is valid.
- We show peer support by encouraging every team member to share.
- We are willing to experiment and learn from both successes and mistakes.
- We replace blame with compassion.
- Take time to observe. Consider what may be going on internally with each of your team members. They may be asking themselves one or more of several relevant questions. These include but are not limited to the following:
- Why would I speak up? I’m almost dismissed and ignored.
- I don’t feel we are on the same page.
- What are we really getting from this?
- I don’t see my purpose with this team or company. What should I do?
- How can I find (or reignite) my motivation?
- Commit long term. Trust is not a one and done deal. There’s no magic pill. There is not one incredible breakthrough and all of a sudden, the team has arrived. Trust in teams is about constant attention and nurture. The trust “muscles” so to speak have to be constantly breaking down and building up, over and over. Over time, the trust gets stronger. There has to be a healthy foundation from which trust can grow, evolve and strengthen.