Teamwork requires trust

One thing that I love about having a relatively small team (it’s myself and Ali, and then seven others) that are full-time employees instead of contractors is the trust that can be built. You certainly can build trust with larger teams and with part-time or contract employees, but it gets more difficult. Having people by your side 40 hours a week, year after year, is a fantastic way to generate that trust.

In Patrick Lencioni’s “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team“, he shares it this way:

“Trust is the foundation of real teamwork. And so the first dysfunction is a failure on the part of team members to understand and open up to one another.“

Getting team members to “understand and open up to one another” doesn’t happen overnight, but the benefits are unbelievable. Not only will they work together far better when they trust one another, but it makes my job much easier as well, for two reasons:

1. I don’t have to follow up to make sure things are done. I’m confident in emailing anyone on my team to take care of something, and I know it’ll get taken care of in a timely manner.
2. The “timely manner” is important too, because it doesn’t always mean “right away”. I trust them to prioritize my request with the rest of their workload, and it tends to work out very well. I try to infuse my requests with a smidge of Commander’s Intent (“here’s what I need done, and here is why I need it”), and the more I can include the “why”, the better they’re able to prioritize it.

This also reminds of something that Shane Parrish shared in “Clear Thinking“, when he said:

There is only one most important thing in every project, goal, and company. If you have two or more most important things, you’re not thinking clearly. This is an important aspect of leadership and problem-solving in general: you have to pick one criterion above all the others and communicate it in a way that your people can understand so they can make decisions on their own. This is true leadership. You need to be clear about what values people are to use when making decisions. If I tell you the most important thing is serving the customer, you know how to make decisions without me. If you make a bad judgment call, but it puts the customer first, I can’t fault you. You did what I wanted.

Trust doesn’t come automatically, but building a place of trust makes for a much better situation for literally everyone involved.