TRUST IN A TEAM
Hi, my name is Kirill Vasiliev and my position is Project Manager. I work in the Saint-Petersburg office for the company 4xxi. In this company, we develop complicated IT projects and startups and we always try to use the most modern IT technologies in the world.
The success of my work depends on the work of my team. For the main philosophy of my work I choose trust as an instrument of communication with all team members.
I learned to work with trust in the last six years and I want to share my knowledge about this with you. This theme can not be told in a short way, because here we have a lot of nuances. So I decided to split up this article because this will be a long story.
In the first part of this article I want to touch on the theme of trust and how it is important in a team, also the first steps that are needed for building trust in a relationship and about building a complex team.
In the second part I will touch on moments like the evolution of trust in relationships, maintaining a level of trust, and control of team resource conditions.
This is my first article in this kind of blog, so I hope for your support!
Why we need this?
The IT sphere is developing very dynamically, every day new technologies and services are coming out. Because of this the recruitment market in the IT world has a high demand for developers, however, at the same time we can see a deficit of highly qualified developers. This disbalance is helping developers to reach rapid growth that may result in frequent changes of work.
In the beginning of a career, project managers grow their skills very quickly but at the same time they make a lot of mistakes. Many managers have the wrong opinion that they are the most important part of the team and the success of the project mainly depends on them. He only counts on himself, but at the same time, he is very demanding of his team members.
The moment when work snowballs always comes, and in that time a project manager cannot control everything alone. If they try it inevitably leads to failure. After receiving new experience and tainting relationships with all team members, managers will go to new companies where they can start everything from scratch.
However the teams remain demotivated with a low level of resource condition and with a feeling of caution to new Project managers. So usually companies try to find managers with better skills that have already collected a big portfolio of personal mistakes and already have personal solutions for the most common problems in management. They are searching for a leader that already knows how to build teams right and will not try to invent the bicycle again.
What we miss?
For daily work a manager should have a fixed list of skills that every company describes in their vacancies:
- Work to project deadlines
- Work with project risks
- High independence
- Searching for solutions to complicated cases
- Communication skills etc
And I want to add here one thing that is even more important — an understanding of basic psychological skills. To be a manager means to work with humans, and it is impossible without an understanding of how humans think.
To be a manager means to work with humans
To show those skills a manager should go through the most complicated test: earn the trust of the team.
Actually, the manager is playing a very important role in the development of IT products. But for clients, it’s just the tip of the iceberg to all of the development process. At the same time, a manager is a conductor and a balancer of interests. However, the destiny of all of the projects are placed in the arms of a team. In more detail the success of the project depends on the resource condition of the team.
Manager is a conductor and a balancer of interests
Moreover, the final result depends on the condition of each team member. Next you will find examples of annoying mistakes, and from these, problems can start to snowball in projects.
- A QA engineer misses a critical bug
- A Developer misses important condition of the architecture
- A designer does not discuss the designs for the possibility of implementation
- The team don’t care about the estimation of the project
- The team don’t help each other quickly with urgent tasks
The reason for these problems is that the resource condition of the team is missing.
What should we begin from?
The psychological adaptation of any human in the team is a process that can not be systematized. The main characters here are emotions. You are a new member, all of the team are looking at you and judging you only through the prism of feelings. All your certificates and wonderful resume were useful in the interview, here is exactly a different challenge.
Close your eyes and imagine the situation.
You came to a work meeting, you still do not know everyone and you are not sure that you have the correct names of the members that you have met. Everyone is discussing something, you are just watching. You want to begin the conversation but you do not know from what to begin with.
What feelings do you have?
The facts and arguments will not help in the time of acclimatization in the team. This is the main difficulty of this stage. You can choose different ways how you can go through it:
- Ask the team to forget everything that was with the past manager (but in fact, nobody will forget)
- You can fire all dissenting people and hire new employees, who share your values, but world history has illustrative examples that show you what may happen.
- But better / more reasonable / more correct / more adequate to build a team from current employees.
If you will go through the last way then the team will forget about all past peripeteias, when they will see your value for the team. And those who will not want to work in the team will resign of their own will.
And from this moment comes the main question that we should ask:
How do you build a team with people who do not know you? It’s like building Voltron from ten different boxes of Lego.
For productive work you need to build mutually beneficial and long-term relationships. And the first and the main build material of relationships is trust.
The main build material of relationships is trust
What kind of step should be the first and what result we want to reach?
The employee should accept that you are not enemies to each other — this is our first level goal. For this you should make a first personal step to each member of the team.
Step 1 — Research
You need to know about problematic or simply important situations that were in the past. For example, in my case, most often the problem was the setting of the deadlines. The team opinion was not taken into account. It is very important to understand that each employee had personal troubles at work and for you, it is very important to know what you have to work with. You should know what are the main holes you will repair in a boat that is called “the team”.
For this, in the beginning, you necessarily need to build a favorable atmosphere of communication: be open about yourself, cover your own personal debits and credits regarding complicated situations in previous work places, and mistakes that you made. It will help show the team that you are a simple human, and after that you will take a chance to receive information about the troubles of humans in the team.
Once the talk about yourself is done, let’s go-to questions for the team. Each developer analyse actions in the team and in the company, also they have their point of view on actions in the past. So we just need to ask teammates to report on everything that was before you. The first three things are most important, the rest are usually marginal.
Step 2— Promise
And now, when we know about the team’s troubles, we need to prepare a little promise that will help to resolve one of the important problems. Provided that the question is adequate and can be resolved fast. Do not promise the trip to Miami, if you can not fulfill it.
For example, I promised that I will not set up any deadlines without the team’s opinion.
In progress of a planning on my first project I’ve made a draft roadmap of a development, that I could have a high level understanding where the deadline of the project is. Next I met my team and shared them all info that I’ve had: possible risks, national days-off, planned vacations of the team, and unexpected situations that could be on our way.
After a small discussion and based on the team’s opinion I’ve suggested a date for the deadline and asked some questions to the team:
“Had I took into account everything I should from your point of view? Need we another info before we make a decision?”
When I’ve received two positive answers I asked the final question:
“Are we agree with the date of the deadline?”
Answer was “yes”.
I’ve spent on two hours more then usual for a deadline planning. One hour on a preparing for the meeting and one more hour for the meeting with the team. But the main thing is the promise that was successfully done. This result gave me a chance to continue a building trust relationship in the team.
You can promise something like:
- Never to release anything by Fridays, whatever that will be the cost to you
- Always ask the team about an estimation of the feature and only after that you will agree on it with your partner
- Help for the team in complicated situations and always take all negative aspects with partners on yourself.
There are simple and adequate promises. The main thing is that your promise satisfied the needs of each person in the team.
So what does it give?
The manager shapes people’s thoughts, knowing that he will respond quickly, based on the foundation of the trust that is being created.
Step 3— Feedback
Next, the manager collects feedback about himself and asks to score some concrete acts. The act should be described: how the manager scores the act from his side. And finally, the manager asks an opinion of the teammate:
“Did I do everything right? Does this act correspond to his expectations? Could something be better?”
The process of feedback forces people to score the promised act. In this case, the teammate scores you from the constructive side, not from the emotional side. And in the case of a positive score of your acts, this will create a personal setting — the first level of the trust.
Feedback forces people to score
In a successful case you will put important thought in the mind of the teammate:
“Cool! The manager values my opinion!”
This is the emotional part, that will help to control the resource conditions of the teammate. The employee without any fear will share with you everything that has happened.
Any human is affected by the influence of his surroundings. For the best quality of work in the team, we need to synchronise the thoughts of teammates, so the process of development goes in unison. This is not an easy task, because each person has an individual perspective of life. All these things are just the first scene in a detective film opening. Our role is to assess the evidence like a true detective, but more about this in the next article about trust! Thanks for reading!
What to read?
Stephen Covey — “Speed of trust”.
The book gives you great basics of understanding how to build trust. But you always need to remember about mentality and lifestyle in the country for building trust relationships.
Lets begin to develop trust skills:
- Start to want to build trust relationships with the team or person.
- Choose the first object to work with.
- Find information about problems or about simple and important situations that were in work
- Setup time and place of the first meeting
- Prepare a story about yourself and difficulties
- Prepare short-term promise
- Fulfill the promise
- Get the feedback
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