Trust Canvas: A tool to build trust in your team

After a series of exercises and brainstorming sessions with various teams, Alexey Pikulev have clustered the most frequently occurring factors that positively influence trust in teams.

After studying what are the most important factors that influence trust in teams, they have created the Team Trust Canvas: A tool to help teams to build trust by thinking about some important trust-related topics to generate new rules or agreements in the team.

The canvas has eight different important topics to be discussed by the team:

1. Clarity. A Team experiences trust when they see transparency and mistrust when things are ambiguous. How shall we build and support the clarity, openness and transparency? How can we avoid the uncertainty and vagueness?
2. Connection. It is natural for people to follow others and build relationships. How can we connect and engage with each other? How can we improve our relationships and reduce conflicts?
3. Compassion. Team members need to care about each other. Are we ready to show concerns? Are we ready to be compassionate?
4. Value. People want to trust those who support their values. How can we align them?
5. Competency. We have confidence in those who stay fresh, innovative and competent. How do we grow our competency?
6. Commitment. We trust only those who demonstrate a commitment to action. How do we take responsibility and fulfill it?
7. Contribution. People are motivated and engaged when they deliver results. People trust results. Is anything getting done? How do our rules and policies promote getting things done? How do our organization’s culture reward results?
8. Consistency. We like to see the things done consistently. Is our trust and confidence rising or falling each Sprint?
9. What else is important for us?

After going through all the topics, your team will have a visual picture that can be a starting point for building Trust in your team.

In this great presentation Pikulev presents some examples of how to apply the Canvas in different scenarios:

Isn't it awesome!

Enjoy!