What happens when you do not trust your colleagues?
By Bernard Chanliau, Tuesday 17 January, 2006
Use appealing to values as an influence tactics
Trust lies at the heart of a functioning, cohesive team. Without it, teamwork is practically impossible. Unfortunately, the word ‘trust’ is used and misused so much. When we talk about ‘trust’ at Xenergie, we mean the confidence among team members that their peers’ intentions are good, and that there is no reason to be protective or careful around the group.
In essence, you must get comfortable with being vulnerable with one another. By being vulnerable we mean being able to expose your weaknesses, skill deficiencies, interpersonal shortcomings, belief systems and to have the courage to ask for help. By ‘exposing’ your vulnerabilities in this way you facilitate a wider and deeper understanding of the individuals within the team and their respective values as a route to building bridges of understanding and joining different ‘inner maps of the world’ together. By bringing all of these factors out in the team arena, you can then build a set of collective values that is built on the needs of individuals as well as the needs of the goal in hand.
As soft as this might sound, it is only when you are truly comfortable being exposed to one another as team members that you begin to act without concern for protecting yourselves.
The costs of failing to do this are great. Teams that lack trust waste inordinate amounts of time and energy managing their behaviours and interactions within the group. They tend to dread team meetings, are reluctant to take risks in asking for or offering assistance to others. As a result, morale on distrusting teams is usually quite low and unwanted turnover high.
When your values are aligned with the team's and organisational values, you generally tend to feel more satisfied than other people who experience value misalignment. Xenergie runs regular team coaching assignment, and the desired outcomes in a team-coaching workshop usually entail the following:
Determining the core values of your team: what codes of behaviours or aspirations does your team value?
Translating the values into behaviours that bring the values to life: how does this impact your team's productivity?
Transforming the values into leadership virtues that will grow your team
Building a strong foundation that will bring alignment, discipline, and integrity to your working team
We offer the following seven-step model for coaching values within a team coaching assignment:
Focus on one value at a time
Identify desired behaviours that evoke and demonstrate that value
Tweak their description of each behaviour until it is specific, observable and measurable
Assess the current performance of those behaviours in the team
Determine the desired performance
Prepare an action plan
Implement personal 1:1 coaching
Appealing to values is a way to influence people based on their values, feelings, and emotions. You make such an appeal by showing how your request is important or how is it consistent with what they consider uplifting, exciting, or morally right. Clearly, this can be a powerful influence tactic.
XenerGie Team Coaching Value sessions begin with a 1-day interactive team workshop in building trust. Our experience at XenerGie is that most teams have not considered their values at all – except perhaps in some lofty mission statement, which has no application in the real working world. Instead, unspoken values develop, many of which are quite destructive and certainly misunderstood by most. Using methods and techniques developed for high achieving teams of the world’s top companies, we have helped many teams to reconstruct the foundations of their future success by examining their team values. Working as a team, the team will determine the core values of their group – aspired values and the real ‘hidden’ values – and reconstruct their required values into a cooperative pact and modus operandi with which to move forward in harmony.