Culture to Engage

5 Ways to Up Your Team's Trust Quotient

The thoughts that hung with me following yesterday's posting, left me feeling guilty.

Guilty that I didn't offer more tips on ways to stimulate trust among your team members. I hope the 5 that follow take away some of my guilt.

Talk the Talk. Take responsibility for role modeling Open Expression. Don’t be afraid to share information about yourself. Encourage others to do the same. Keep at it.  BONUS TIP:  Right now write down 5 ways you are willing to initiate conversation about positive trust .

Build the Pattern. At team meetings and water-cooler chats, establish the tell-and-ask pattern. The pattern of frequently/regularly inviting informal discussion of trust (positively) This is the repetition required to anchor the pattern. It’s worth it. BONUS TIP: Right now write 3 questions that are informal AND stimulate comfortable discussion of trust, what creates trust, what supports trust, what trust benefits.

Distribute to Discuss. Make it a Team Belief that a key reason for distributing information to everyone is so that it can be discussed. BONUS TIP: Without creating "reading overload" create one way to stimulate attention to and discussion of some portion of the information constantly being distributed.

Make Good News. Usually people want to complete work rather than fulfill roles. Not much to say about one’s role. Much to share about one’s work. Create opportunities to comfortably share good news about the work performed. BONUS TIP: Consider two types of Good News Sharing opportunities: one in person, the other in writing

Use a Constructive Question. Have your team adopt a specific question that does two things: directs attention to the team’s purpose and stimulates communication. The question can be an icebreaker at team meetings, an add-on to “Hi! How are you?” and a regular element in team reports.  BONUS TIP: How might you encourage/involve your team in the creation and construction of the Constructive Question?

Enough Trust to Get Engaged?

Teams and teamwork contribute to a company's success.       

( ) True?         ( ) False?

The answer is obvious. No matter how large a team--small group, unit, department, or entire company--how well every member of the team engages in the team's  efforts contributes directly to how successful the team can be.

And how actively an entire team engages in "teamship," the greater the team's contribution to company success.

So, what's instrumental to engagement by each team member and by the team itself?

Trust: Critical to a Successful Team’s Foundation
A team that builds its harmony on trust works with the ease and enthusiasm that bring success. Trust and team are almost synonymous, but it's wrong to assume trust happens as soon as the team is created. Bringing trust to the top of every team member’s mind is a giant step toward team members becoming more fully engaged.

It's up to the manager to take that giant step.

Here are 3 benefits that might make the step seem a bit easier.  These are  "engagement benefits" from increased trust. 

1. Increased Efficiency -- Team members trust that every one will carry out her responsibility. Each member engages in her specific functions with more complete attention, energy, and involvement. As distractions decrease, efficiency increases.
2. Enhanced Unity -- Greater trust among team members removes doubts, cracks, flaws in the team personality. The greater strength increases team’s commitment to its purpose.  Commitment  reinforces engagement; engagement reinforces commitment.
3. Mutual Motivation -- Team members trust one another in a more inclusive way. Each member then consciously and subconsciously strives to uphold his teammate's trust. That motivation stimulates the desire for peak performance.  That's the raw material of engagement.

Key Question: How do you build trust as a fundamental team possession and achieve these benefits?

Short Answer: Provide specific trust-building tools and tactics that make it easier for team members to build that trust. Team members want to trust one another from the outset. 

I elaborate on that answer with 3 traits you can apply to establish a foundation for trust among your team members.

1. Open Expression: Bring trust to the forefront of everyone’s mind as a common, everyday discussion item. Make it a constant agenda item. Use the word "trust" in slogans and e-mail signatures. Ask informal questions about trust. Not in the negative, rather in the positive. (CORE: the process is Communication, the event/situation is Opportunity.)
2. Information Equity: Ensure that everyone has access to similar information. Only on a strict need-to-know basis is that not the case. Construct processes that ensure simultaneous distribution of same information. (CORE: information is Resource.)
3. Performance Reliability: A high level of team trust creates a “victorious circle.” This reinforces team members’ desire to hold up their end of the bargain by performing as expected, if not better. This reliability, in turn, upholds the trust from other team members and other teams. Construct events in which trust is recognized, appreciated, celebrated. (CORE: Communication, Opportunity and Encouragement combine in situations in which this trust-generates-more-trust phenomenon is expressed and celebrated.)

These are traits of the management style used. They are elements of the culture of engagement. Their reality is up to the manager.

NOTE: If you've not been reading Culture to Engage, here's a catch-up on the CORE concept.

Manager's efforts to develop a culture of engagement I have segmented into 4 categories:

• Communication: making clear and repeated employees' expectations...
• Opportunity: creating situations that attract employee involvement and engagement...
• Resources: providing the tools, information, coaching, etc., to ease engagement...
• Encouragement: offering enthusiasm and compliments for engagement evidenced...

Getting to the CORE of Employee Engagement

The most requested area of information concerning employee engagement is how to. Respondents to my management survey in December 07 overwhelmingly want to know

• How to increase engagement
• How to sustain engagement
• How to engage personnel if/when enthusiasm wanes
• How to personalize it for each employee
• How to foster a culture of employee engagement
• and more right along these lines.

I offer you ways to build the CORE of your Employee Engagement Culture. Be sure that acronym and its components excite me so much you'll see recommendations, suggestions, guest writers with an abundance of how-to in each area.

Communication: the responsibility to be present and prepared to share and receive communication continually. Whatever you call it, however you view it, communication is a must-do to build a true Employee Engagement Culture. Think of specific verbs: asking, answering, listening, updating, explaining, inviting. Find ways to plan specific communications in each of those and other modalities. Think of a monthly town meeting or a weekly e-mail news. Include an office walk-around in which you stop and "just talk with people" for 30 minutes (or 60 or 90 or whatever it takes) every week. Make communication a regularly planned action and it will be(come) a successful action that contributes to successful engagement.

Opportunity: the commitment to create, recognize, and endorse situations that give employees reason to engage. Kevin Costner demonstrated that if you "build it...they will come." You may not get 100% success, but you'll certainly have more people engaged if you put the opportunity right in front of them. Consider projects and development incentives. Think of team competitions and publicly celebrated performance goals. How about forums in which people can demonstrate success and accomplishments? Keep in mind: one can engage to the job, personal/professional development, career, network, company, and community. Any and all of these benefit your organization.

Resources: the decision and design to make available resources that expedite an employee's taking on engagement. When one cannot find the tools, information, instruction, assistance, equipment, time, or other resources, she might not get to hot about the assignment or project. Fear of failure combined with fear of the unknown can stop potential engagement dead in its tracks. Make the decision then commit to designing and making available for your people such resources as training and learning, coaching and mentoring, cross-department projects and efforts, championing and sponsoring, and much more. How about this: a "resource development team" whose members have ownership of identifying, locating, recommending resources?  You would have a steady source of resource recommendations/creation and a unique engagement opportunity for members of this team.

Encouragement: the freedom to support an individual's and a team's engagement with your enthusiasm. You can assume your folks will engage in their work, their job, your team, the company. Or you can seize every opportunity to encourage their engagement. Psychology says it is easier to inspire someone already moving thanks to just-experienced success than to motivate someone standing still. (Newton said it, too, in his s First Law of Motion). You may have to practice becoming a cheerleader. It's worth it. The more you offer congratulations, host celebrations, hand out recognition and (deserved) praise, the more often you will have cause to. If it's engagement you encourage, it's engagement you will get.

Take it to the CORE.

Let Your Weight Down

"One way to make your team feel more trust is to let your weight down."

"What does that mean?"

"You know, just opening up, being authentic, not putting on airs."

Rhonda offered that last week in my team-building workshop at the Texas Hospital Home Health Agency conference. We were discussing ways trust contributes to team success. Rhonda was answering my question about how a manager/leader can generate top-of-mind awareness of trust among team members.

Rhonda suggested the manager always be authentic. Hers was a new metaphor for me. (I do know let your hair down.)

Certainly got me thinking.

Pretty impossible to be part of a successful team and not be engaged in contributing to the team. Pretty impossible for a team to be successful unless its members trust one another.

So, Rhonda's statement is on the money. To be trustworthy you have to be authentic. To be authentic, you may have to let your weight down.

Here are 5 suggestions:

• Share thoughts and ideas. Encourage team members to share what they think and how they think. That helps them know one another. Much easier to trust someone you know. Sharing your own thoughts and ideas demonstrates your belief in the process.
• Share mistakes. Let the team know you own your mistakes. It's a sure illustration of your genuineness to let others in on your mistakes. Also a great opportunity to learn and share learning.
• Request assistance. Ask for help and you admit you cannot do it all yourself. Such an admission is up front authentic. [I don't mean asking a team member to take on extra work. I mean asking for personal assistance with something they may do better than you.]
• Offer assistance. Without micromanaging or taking control from the individual, offer to lend a hand. This demonstrates your commitment to team and team members' successes.
• Expand the talk. When appropriate, allow conversation to move beyond business. Personal experiences, shared memories, lessons learned...all let your weight down.

I love it when I get to facilitate a workshop and learn something. What a blessing.