Trust: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
In his book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni considers an absence of trust as the foundational issue that corrodes a functioning team. Traci and Rob explore common red flags that indicate this could be a dysfunction on your team. They also offer some valuable solutions to building vulnerability-based trust among your people.
Check out the other episodes in this series:
Transcript
Announcer:
Welcome to the Overly Human podcast where we discuss all things human in the workplace. Because it's not just business—it's personal too.
Traci:
Hey Rob.
Rob:
Hey Traci, how are you?
Traci:
I'm good, happy new year, by the way for everybody who's listening. We are recording in January and happy for 2021.
On the last episode, which we hope everybody caught, we did a little introduction. And, we decided that we are going to talk about Patrick Lencioni's five behaviors of a cohesive and healthy team.
And, as I said in the last episode, something I'm passionate about, I love talking about these five behaviors. I think that health of a team is just as important as profitability. And, actually, if you don't have a healthy team, you're going to be hard-pressed to be as profitable as you possibly can be.
So, today we're going to kick off with the very first, and what I will venture to say the most important behavior of a healthy and cohesive team which is trust. Super excited to talk about it, how about you?
Rob:
Yeah, I am too. This is going to be good. I think that when we talk about the foundational piece—and Patrick does a good job of building this up as a pyramid that stacks on top of each other—and each one of these is dependent on this foundational piece of trust. And, I think it's probably good to just give a good definition here, and what kind of trust are we talking about, Traci?
Traci:
We are talking about vulnerability-based trust. And when I go into teams and talk to people about trust, oftentimes I'll hear leaders say, "Oh, our team, totally we have that one down because we really, really know each other well. We can read each other, we've been together a long time. We totally have that trust down." And, I like to quickly correct that, that's not the trust we're talking about. We're not talking about the, "I trust, I know exactly what he's going to say." Or, "I trust, I understand what their next move is going to be." This is a different type of trust. This is a real true relational trust.
And vulnerability-based trust basically means that team members are comfortable being open. Even maybe exposing themselves to one another. Like exposing themselves in the way of feeling safe and free to admit when they make a mistake, maybe what fear they might have. Like, there aren't political games, there's not behavior that you hear time and time again wastes everybody's time and energy. These are people that truly have a relationship with each other where they feel like they can be honest and authentic. And, that's the type of trust we're talking about today.
Rob:
Yeah, that's a lot harder, because basically we're asking our teams to take off their masks and to be real with each other, right? We love throwing around the word authentic, and that's what this is. We want people to be authentic with each other while being vulnerable, right? And, that's a really difficult thing to do, because that exposes yourself to all kinds of other bad things that can come with vulnerability. And not that vulnerability is bad—let me correct myself—but you have to be open to being hurt, to have the kind of vulnerability-based trust that we're talking about.
Traci:
Yeah, and part of the reason why it's so hard in the business world is because we are sort of fed these lies, or mantras, or kind of the rallying cry of the business world. Which is, look out for number one. Claw your way to the top. You're climbing a corporate ladder, or you may have to step on some people along the way. So, it's a very individualistic way of looking at the business world that this is a race to the top. Companies are racing each other, employees are racing each other.
And, so it's a highly competitive environment that can be created, it doesn't have to be created. I mean, we want to be competitive. We want to be innately ambitious, but we want to make sure that our ego isn't basically trumping everything to the point where we have these environments that feel threatening, unsafe. Our employees have a certain amount of paranoia. And there is this doggy dog kind of mentality. And, that is either really apparent or sort of passively hidden under the surface of our teams.
Rob:
Yeah. Unfortunately, this is an easy part of human nature to fall into, and there's a lot of reinforcements out there in some popular reading about business. And, even the way we think about competition, that there can be a winner and a loser. And, if that exists in our teams, really bad stuff can start to happen and will happen. And, that's how we end up with like ego cults and things like that. And organizations where people are afraid to disagree with each other and to voice their opinions.
And if we really do believe that we're better together, and more brains, we have the right people in the room, then we are selling our organizations and our company's way short by not letting all of those people actually have a voice into what's going on. And that they feel the place where they can voice those opinions and we can take the best ideas.
Traci:
Yeah. Not having trust really does stifle innovation. Because if we don't have people who feel like they can say they made a mistake or be able to admit their mistakes, then we can't change things for the better. If we have people that aren't looking out for each other and are only looking out for number one, then we also stifle innovation because then we're hearing just the loudest voices, right? So trust is so important not just to have a great day at work, but it's also very important to have a great business that's innovative, and inspiring, and productive.
Rob:
And I think I'll take it one step further, not only the loudest voices, but often the most aggressive voices. And once you let it be a competition of who's going to be the loudest, who's going to be the most aggressive with their opinions, then that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Where it becomes a competition to be heard, and you have some people who are wired differently or will just opt-out. And then you lose out on their perspective entirely. And that's not something that any of us should be okay with. If they're the right people to have in the room, then we want to hear from all of those people.
Traci:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Traci:
So, let's talk about some ways, if you're listening, that you can understand or maybe identify if you might have trust issues on your team. So, some behavior you might see if there some trust issues are
You might have some people on your team pretending they know something when they don't. So, they're basically just like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." And in the back of their head thinking, "I'll Google that later, I'll go ask Susie or our Fred to help me." Because, they're too nervous to say, "I don't know what you're talking about." So, if you see that repeatedly happen, that's a problem.
If you have blame, a lot of blame-shifting. People not wanting to take ownership for mistakes, or issues, or hiccups in process, that's also a red flag.
Gossiping, passive-aggressiveness, false harmony, and fakeness. This is one that sometimes people miss. They think, "Oh, I don't see aggressive behavior." Everybody looks like they're being really nice to each other and they care. That doesn't necessarily mean you have strong trust on your team. If you feel like there's a lot of fakenesses, and people aren't really holding each other accountable, we're just kind of pretending we're all getting along all of the time. That's also a problem and paranoid people.
And—also I love to ask owners this too—is stalled innovation. Do you feel like something is making your team stuck, or keeping your team stuck? Because stalled innovation is also a very big red flag that there might be a trust breakdown somewhere on the team.
Rob:
Yeah. And I think another one out there that I've seen is when you hear the comments after the fact of, "I didn't think that would work anyway." That one drives me nuts, it's like, "If you didn't think it worked, where were you? Why didn't we have this conversation, and debate before we did it and the mistakes were made? And I've worked in organizations that don't have trust and all of those things and I've seen so many of those red flags, but it's a lack of spirited debate.
People think that when you have trust, you have less conflict. And I think that's the exact opposite of what is really true. When you have teams that trust each other that are willing to go to battle with each other, in some ways, for over ideas, not people then the room livens up, and you actually have more spirited debate.
Traci:
Absolutely. And the vulnerable behavior that we want to see, and that we should be looking for, literally I want leaders to have their ear open in meetings. They should be hearing their staff—and themselves included—saying things like, "I'm sorry" or, "I need some help with this" or, "I'm not sure I understand exactly what's happening right now" or, "you know what? You're better at that than I am, so can you sit with me or help me out on this?" Saying, "I'm sorry" or, "oh my gosh, I totally screwed up, you guys. I need your help." If you are hearing that type of language on your team, you are really in a good place. And, if you're not hearing those things, or hearing him very infrequently, then again you're going to want to kind of tap into where is your trust and get measured.
And, as you mentioned before, this starts at the top. Nothing is going to kill trust like a leader who can't say these things. A leader who can't say they're wrong, or say they're sorry. The leaders set the tone, the person at the top sets the tone. It is really hard for people in lower down positions, and the totem pole to say they're sorry or just admit they made a mistake. When the person at the top doesn't like that, doesn't do it themselves, doesn't like it, gets angry when they hear people have made mistakes. If you're not leading with the right behavior, you're just not going to see the right behavior, because people are just going to be too fearful.
Rob:
Yeah, we've said this before and leadership matters, it always matters. It's one of the most important things that cohesive teams have is strong leaders who are willing to lead by example. What leaders say is important, what leaders don't say is important. What the action they take, and what action they leave out is all noticeable by the teams that they provide leadership for.
Traci:
Yeah, absolutely. That's why leadership's hard because the buck stops with you in so many ways. And, so the first question that everybody needs to ask themselves is, what part am I playing in this?
Rob:
Like, one of the things that you went back and said earlier was people the blame game, right? Like there was an organization I worked at in a former life, a big corporate place where I'll never forget when I got there the politics were such that step one on anything you were going to do was identify the scapegoat. Who are we going to blame when things don't work? Every meeting. And it was unbelievable how toxic that culture was. And everybody who had achieved any success, there was trails of crushed heads on the way there. And they were just completely ineffective. They spent more time arguing about who is to blame to make sure it couldn't be them than they were to actually solving their clients' problems and their customers' problems.
Traci:
Yeah. It's really damaging to a team, and this is why trust is not easy. That's why I encourage leaders not to quickly say, "Oh, we've got trust covered." Because, it's not easy, and even if right now today you feel like your team is pretty solid with trust. Know it's like any other relationship like our marriages or our siblings. We have to continue to work on it, to cultivate it, and to protect it. Because, building trust is hard, keeping trust is hard. And, so when breakdown happens, we need to swoop in, repair and rebuild. And, so it's just something that is taking the pulse on the trust on your team. Again, because we're talking about the first level, the foundation here of the pyramid. This is what we need to pay the most attention to as leaders when it comes to team health.
Rob:
Yeah. Aand it takes so long to develop good trust, but it's so easy to break down. And you can waste so much good effort by a couple, not even bad decisions, but just non-intentional decisions. And, it's so frustrating to watch when you see leaders, or people do things and you're like, "Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, what is going on? Why was that done?" You didn't stop and think about the impact of the downstream stuff. And, it just is so important to have this figured out.
Traci:
It is, and it can take a long time to develop really strong, deep, rooted trust. But, there are some tools and exercises, some things that you can do to move the ball down the field much faster.
Rob:
Are we talking about trust falls in woods?
Traci:
We're talking about trust falls, exactly.
Rob:
I'll be honest with you, Traci, I've known you for a long time. I'm fairly confident that if you trusted me to trust fall, I could catch you. But, I'm not a small person, and I know you would intend to catch me, but I don't think it would work out for either of us.
Traci:
I know, I'd end up the squishy cushion underneath, like flat out like Gumby. No, that would be funny though if I did come in and I was like, "Today's workshop is going to be trust falls. Now, everybody get in groups of two, and my job here is done." No, we're talking about something deeper and more clever, thank God.
But, yes I am talking about some exercises and some tools that we can use. I always say this, and I know I've said this on our podcast before, which is the best way to build trust is to really know each other. If you have just a surface level relationship with each other at work, and I'm not saying that everybody has to be best friends, and having holiday dinners together. I'm just saying we must endeavor to know who each other is more. And, if we can get there, we can really, like I said, move that ball down the field.
There's a the fundamental attribution error, which I've also talked about before, but I'll just remind everybody. It's the fact that humans tend to falsely attribute negative behaviors of others to their character internal factors while they attribute their own negative behavior to environmental factors. So, for instance, I'm driving down the road and somebody cuts me off. I immediately say, "Oh my gosh, that guy is such a jerk." But, if I'm driving to work and I'm a little late, and I cut somebody off, I think, "Oh, I'm sorry, but I'm just late for work." So, I attributed it to my circumstances, I don't attribute it to, I cut you off because I think I'm a bad person. But, I will do that quickly to somebody else, so that's what the fundamental attribution error is.
It happens all the time, and the only way to remedy it is to know the person. So, if I'm driving to work and somebody cuts me off, and I think, “Ehhh.” But, then I drive up next to that person, and I see it's you Rob driving the car, I think, "Oh, it's Rob. He probably didn't see me." Or, "Oh, it's Rob, he probably is also in a hurry to get to work." So, I immediately can forgive you and trust in that moment that you didn't mean to do that to me. And, that's only because I know you, and that's what we're trying to get here.
So, one of the easiest and best, and actually kind of fun ways to get to know each other better at work is to do assessments. To do something like DiSC, or Myers-Briggs, or Colby, or EQ-i, StrengthFinders, and do a workshop or fun exercises around it. So, we can learn about each other's personality styles, behavioral tendencies. We can understand that we all have strengths and weaknesses. We're all wrestling with things, and those weaknesses show up more when we're stressed. And we learn to give each other a little bit more grace, because we learn we're all wired in a certain way. So that's one really great way, I think, that teams can get to know each other and who they are and how they operate pretty quickly.
Rob:
I think those kinds of workshops and those kinds of assessments give everybody on the team language to use, and to call things out, and to recognize and those moments. And that's so important too, is just to equip people with language and permission to talk about those things that otherwise exist in the surface and exist in the circumstances, but aren't necessarily on the surface.
Traci:
Yes. And also because we were talking before about how some people can be aggressive, or take over the conversation, or the loudest voice gets heard. If you're doing like, say a DiSC workshop where you see how a dominant behavior might act and how a more supportive behavior might retreat and you've learned about that, and you have that common vocabulary—like you're talking about—you can kind of call it out in the moment. Or, somebody else who's observing that happening can call it out, and be like, "Hey, hey remember when we learned about this? This is what's happening right now. Your dominant personality is like overtaking their support. So, maybe we need to take a break here or take a breath." And, they've all been given the tools to hold each other accountable, and how we're communicating with each other.
And, again like a really open, honest meeting like that will just so deepen the trust on the team, because people will feel protected and safe.
Rob:
And, I think that there's some things that we have to do in this world where most of us are remote. We're recording this still in the middle of worldwide pandemic, and all of that. So we try to record things that are a little more timeless, but this is what's going on in the world. And a lot of us are still isolated from each other. And like there's additional effort that has to take place when we can't be in the same space.
And one of the simple things that I think you can do is just—even us type A personalities—allow a little space at the beginning of meetings for chit-chat to get people to know each other. Because that's not happening organically. And in the Zoom world, we're like if you come in with your agenda and you drive immediately into it, and you just want to like, "Hey, we're going to get these things done, and I'm type of person who's going to drive and stick to the agenda for everything." We're missing an opportunity that we would have gotten other ways in a place where we could be in the same physical space.
So, allow for that. Maybe even have icebreakers at the beginning of your meetings that allow people to share something that's in a structured way if you need it. But those things are not wasteful time. Those things are invaluable with the getting to know each other.
Traci:
Yeah. I love that example because I feel like we don't give each other enough permission. Like we're in such a hurried, we must be productive, and overly productive society that we aren't taking the time to just say, "How are you?" And, we don't really understand the value of that.
This conversation right now that we're having about trust is where that value is. That it is okay to take three minutes when you're starting a conversation to just talk about life with each other. Or a meeting five minutes out of the entire meeting to have a check-in, or 10 minutes to have a check-in at the top of the meeting is so valuable. Again, because we are getting to know each other.
And, I remember this in my own experience, HGTV had the main headquarters was based in the South, based here in Tennessee. And it took some of us in these bigger, larger, crazy cities to get used to the fact that every time we called somebody in Knoxville, Tennessee, that they started with, "How you doing? What's happening? What'd you make last night?" That type of conversation, but I actually fell in love with it.
And then some of those people that I worked with that were based there became some of the people I admired the most and felt like I had the best relationships with. And I really do attribute it to that just kind of Southern way of really wanting to know you and not being in so much of a hurry. So it's a great, great lesson, but it's also a great business tool.
Rob:
All right, you got another way to build trust?
Traci:
I do. I have one more that I'll toss out. I could say a million, but for the sake of time. One thing that we do, and this kind of is along the same lines, but in our workshop—when we do Patrick Lencioni workshops—where we have tools and exercises for each one of these levels. And for trust, we do personal histories with each other.
So when we bring people together for a day-long session, we go around and have each person that's participating in the workshop—and these are usually the smaller workshops—where somebody, they'll answer just a few questions. Where you grew up? How many kids were in the family? Where were you in that place? And what was the most difficult or important challenge of your childhood?
And, I know some people listening right now might be like, "Are you insane? That sounds really kind of too deep or too vulnerable." But, I'm not looking for people's deepest, darkest secrets. I really want them to just sort of, what's the first thing that pops in your mind when you think about a difficult or important challenge of your childhood.
I've never had anybody on a team say anything that was inappropriate, or something we couldn't handle. But man it has, at least for me, a hundred percent of the time has been wildly successful.
That team gets to learn something, even about people they've worked with for years, they get to hear a story and learn something about that person that they did not know. And all of a sudden that person becomes even more human, even more understandable, even more connected to them than they were before we walked into the room.
So it's just a way to just open the door a little bit, share something about yourself, and setting the stage for people to know that you're a real person. You're a human being, and we can have a relationship as we work together.
Rob:
Yeah. We recently—just full disclosure—at Sparkbox and its leadership team kind of went through this workshop with Navigate just the end of last year. And, this was one of the things that when the person who was leading it, Zach, kind of went through and I was like, "Oh, okay, this is going to be interesting."
But, I think that after going through it one it wasn't weird at all, it worked out. Everybody had something to share, we walked away understanding a little bit. Because those formative years shaped so much of who we are and what we do.
But, I also believe that the ability to be able to share those things can be a good indicator of the trust is there to begin with of how deep people are willing to go.
So I thought it was a really good experience going through that exercise with our leadership team. And we left that section feeling just spending that time was invaluable.
Traci:
It's a beautiful thing. And I think again, I always start with a leader. And people will go as deep as the leader goes. There'll be as honest, and free with the exercise as the leader is. And so again, I just encourage our leaders when they go through these types of workshops, or behavior assessments, or they're trying to just really solidify the trust on their team to have courage. It's all about courage, and if you can have courage you can believe in what we're talking about today, then you're going to really get far.
Rob:
Yeah. That's absolutely right. It's about showing up, and showing up with your true, authentic self and people know. People know, and they can feel it, and they will follow if there is any kind of trust that can be worked on, they will follow.
Traci:
Yeah, exactly. I mean we can't say it enough. It is important, this is why we're so passionate about this first episode on the pyramid here. But, this is the one that's most important when we're doing workshops. It's the one we spend the most time on in the pyramid because without it no other level of the pyramid works. And, the next episodes are going to be just as informative, and just as fun to talk about. But, again if you don't get this right then trying to institute the next four, it's going to be really hard for you to be successful.
Rob:
Yeah, well that was a lot of fun, Traci. Thank you.
Traci:
Thank you, till next time.
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The Overly Human podcast is brought to you by Navigate the Journey and Sparkbox. For more information on this podcast, or to get in touch with Traci or Rob, go to overlyhuman.com. Thanks so much for listening.
