The Hidden Power of Trust
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I spent the past few days with an excellent Leadership Team.
When you spend a day and a half with a group of people, you get to know a lot about them.
The topics for our time together were time management, task management, and mastering communication. But for some reason, when you’re with a special team, you end up talking about a lot more than the topics. We laughed, we debated, and we celebrated each other.
Time flies in that kind of environment. And by the end of our time together, we all felt closer to each other—which again is funny considering we spent a good deal of time simply talking about how to organize your time and tasks so that your mornings, days, quarters, and years are a success. But with a special team, things rarely stay surface level.
We debated whether it makes sense to check your email while on vacation. Or if you should feel bad delegating something hard to one of your team members. We roleplayed challenging conversations with an employee—a few people even got up in front of the room and practiced having a crucial conversation. Then everyone else who was watching —10 to 12 people—gave good, honest feedback.
People were generally positive, and there were a lot of “good jobs!”. But there were also a couple who said, “Hey, I noticed you weren’t direct, and I thought that could be somewhere you get better,” Which is a gosh darn gift, by the way! What a joy it is to receive good, caring feedback.
So, I got to thinking: What is it that makes some teams so capable of this kind of shared growth and development? And why do those teams deliver such fantastic results?
To me, the foundational element is care. Care is your ability to put the interests of others at the front of your mind. You are not focused solely on what is best for you. You are focused on what is best for the whole. You are also focused on others getting better. You are not focused on being the smartest and most interesting in the room. You root for others.
When care exists, most everything else is easy.
What follows care is trust. When trust exists, teammates act without fear of judgment. Without fear of judgment, their actions and words are truer. They represent the individual in a whole-person way that makes it easy to understand their perspective.
So, what is it that makes some teams so capable of this kind of shared growth and development?
Care
Trust
And why do those teams deliver such fantastic results?
When care and trust exist, sound, healthy debate follows. And with good, healthy debate come crazy ideas. Instead of rejecting those ideas, these great teams allow the idea to grow and get better until they are so crazy that they just may work.
This is the flywheel of delivering better than your competition. Because as your crazy ideas flow and you accomplish those ideas, you truly become better and different. When that’s the case, it’s easy to win clients and great new people, which creates even more successes and great new people. Not to mention industry-leading profitability.
This kind of care and trust can be cultivated in your organization. Start by getting your leadership team together regularly. I highly recommend hiring a great facilitator who creates open and honest environments (something our Well Built facilitators know how to do extremely well). As you work on your relationships with each other, spend time working on your business as well. The more you learn and do together, the faster your care + trust flywheel will turn.
Every Contractor should be making an effort for this.
Spark Notes:
When care and trust are truly present, feedback gets honest, ideas get wild (in the best way), and teams start doing the kind of work that sets them apart.
It’s no coincidence that the highest-performing teams are often the ones who simply root for each other.
If you want that kind of shared growth and success, get your leadership team together regularly—with a great facilitator—and start turning that care + trust flywheel.
