Building Trust

Mutual trust is most basic for building a good team. Without trust, building a harmonious team is almost impossible, because lots of team works totally depend on mutual trust within the team. For instance, the effectiveness of peer review for code and document is decided by the degree of mutual trust between team members. If someone doesn’t trust others, she/he could not seriously take in any comments or suggestions from others; instead she/he will simply defend her/his original working output in a blind way. Again, getting real working status, popularizing new working method, and changing work assignments all need mutual trust.

 

Now that trust is in the centre of smooth team work, how can we build it effectively?

 

1.       Be well familiar with each other.
The prerequisite of trusting a man is you well know her/him. If you don’t know someone, it’s almost impossible for you to really trust her/him automatically and from your bottom of heart. Regarding being familiar with some, just knowing her/his name is totally not enough. You need to know her/his education background, past working experience, personality and even personal hobbies and interests. Besides knowing others through working together, some outside team building activities and entertainments such as team diner and sports can largely facilitate trust building process. This is the reason why some companies give each team a regular team building fee.

2.       Be used to sharing knowledge and experience.
Encouraging knowledge and experience sharing in the team wide help team members build mutual trust. If someone gets used to learn knowledge and experience from others, it’s not difficult for her/him to seriously consider other guys’ negative feedbacks. Apart from helping build trust, knowledge sharing also accelerates individual and team improvements in a variety of areas. There are many styles of knowledge sharing activities, which will be addressed in later chapter.

3.       Build common understanding.
Only if we can reach common understanding for day-to-day team work, can we work together in trustable and harmonious atmosphere. Common understanding is easy to say, but at times hard to reach. Everyone probably has her/his view for some thing. When facing different understanding for one thing, negotiation is a must. The problem is how to negotiate and how to exchange different understanding so as to reach agreement? As team leader, you should organize effective and efficient discussion session, within which give everyone a chance to explain her/his own concern and understanding on the matter and ask everyone, besides defending his/her own view, to unbiased understand other guys’ thoughts. Don’t let your ass decide your mind. Assuming you sit on other guys’ seat help reach agreement.
However, anyway, we are living in a realistic world, not in an ideal Utopia. From time to time, it’s unrealistic to ask every one totally to accept the agreement due to different background and viewpoints. In that case, compromise probably is the last resort for pushing team work forward.

4.   Fairly performance evaluation.
     As team leader, one of your major responsibilities is to fairly evaluate your staff’s performance. Fair performance assessment and corresponding reward and recognition help maintain team morale on the basis of mutual trust in the long term. In addition, letting team member feel her/his performance being fairly assessed and recognized is helpful for consolidating your authority.