Building Trust as a Leadership Team
Dan and I work with a variety of leadership teams, helping them intentionally form as a team to create the best environment for getting things done. One of the key topics we discuss is what gets the best and worst from each individual, and how this translates into designing their ideal team environment together. It’s been interesting to observe some universals in terms of what people want.
No surprises… the number one thing, regardless of industry or seniority, is TRUST. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who says that trust isn’t fundamental to them. For good reason - it’s nigh on impossible to get things done efficiently in a low trust environment. Trust often gets a hammering during restructuring change, and needs a concerted effort to build it back up again as an existing team, or as a newly formed team.
To genuinely build trust as a leadership team, a fundamental conversation that needs to be resolved up front is: who is your ‘first team’? Is it your leadership team, or your functional/delivery team of direct reports?
People often feel conflicted on this question – you want to be loyal to both, right? But you do have to be clear about where you’re placing your ultimate loyalty – and that has to fit with your purpose as a leader, which is to help deliver outcomes for the organisation, not just your individual team.
If you really want to build trust with your leadership team, all members of the team have to feel you unequivocally have each other’s backs. We have worked with some organisations where the senior leadership team was more like a federated collection of fiefdoms, each with the goal of advancing their own team’s interests. On the surface it appeared good for their individual teams’ performance and engagement. At a senior leadership team level and organisational perspective, it was detrimental to performance. Leaders spent their time advancing their own agendas. There was a lack of genuine collaboration, which flowed through the organisation. Discussions were guarded, information not shared and difficult conversations were avoided or blew up.
Not really knowing where people’s loyalties really lie creates a ‘trust tax’ on all of your interactions as a team - having to constantly second-guess people’s true intent is slow and inefficient.
This is where clarity of purpose comes in – both organisational purpose, and your collective purpose as a leadership team in delivering outcomes for the organisation and its customers. If the leadership team can agree that this collective purpose should be the ultimate driver, it will help provide clarity and guide action when there are the inevitable tensions between what is right for the organisation, versus what is right for individual teams. If you can get that bottom line in place, then it will take away a lot of noise, and will enable you to more efficiently get on with the other big rocks.