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“Braving Connection” — how to build trust and team motivation

The best teams I have been a part of at carwow have been highly motivated, high performing, but also very fun. Team motivation has always interested me and the more experience I have gained in managing teams, the more I have realised that trust is absolutely fundamental to success. For this reason, I wanted to dig into what trust means and how it can be created.

In the book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni, the first dysfunction is the absence of trust. He describes trust as:

“…the confidence among team members that their peers’ intentions are good, that there is no reason to be guarded. When team members have trust, they can be vulnerable with each other. When people can be vulnerable with each other, energy shifts from protecting the self to the job at hand.”

In the story within the book, it goes on to say that “the only way to build trust is to overcome our need for invulnerability.” The importance placed on vulnerability to build and maintain trust cannot be underestimated. Brene Brown uses the acronym BRAVING to understand trust; she says she uses this acronym “because when we trust, we are braving connection with someone.”

Creating Trust

One of the tools we use at carwow in the pursuit of continuous improvement is the retrospective. One of the Principal Engineers added this description to our team’s retrospective:

“This is a safe place to expose your ideas and talk about how we can improve as a team.

Without thinking regularly on how we can make it better it’s hard to bring change in processes, and without experimenting new processes we won’t improve as a team.

Bring your notes, your ideas, your experiences and also keep in mind the prime directive of retrospectives:

Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.”

This really resonated with me and encapsulated a lot of what trust means. It reinforces this idea that team members’ intentions are good, and when they can be vulnerable with each other the energy shifts from protecting the self to improving as a team. In order to understand how to create trust further, I wanted to explore two models.

Model 1: The Trust Equation

https://trustsuite.trustedadvisor.com/

• Credibility has to do with the words we speak. In a sentence we might say, “I can trust what she says about intellectual property; she’s very credible on the subject.”
• Reliability has to do with actions. We might say, “If he says he’ll deliver the product tomorrow, I trust him, because he’s dependable.”
• Intimacy considers how safe people are sharing with you.
• The fourth characteristic, self-orientation, refers to personal focus. Too much self-focus will lower your degree of trustworthiness.

Model 2: The Elements of Trust

https://keithayers.typepad.com/files/elements-of-trust.pdf

This model identifies four elements that create trust:

• Reliability: You do what you say you will do.
• Acceptance: Accept others for who they are, don’t judge, criticise or humiliate.
• Openness: Be open about what you think, believe, how you feel and your priorities.
• Congruence: Say and do what you believe, walk the talk, be straightforward, be consistent.

Breaking down the models

Analysing the two models, they both seem to include four fundamental elements:

• Able: This is fundamentally about skills and knowledge.To be trustworthy, an individual needs to demonstrate understanding of the subject and capability to perform tasks associated with it
• Dependable: They need to do the things they’ve said they’d do, both to a standard and within the timeframe specified
• Open: To be trustworthy an individual needs to share but also they need to be open to other people and ideas
• Caring: Trust is a two-way thing and they must not pursue their own self-interest at the expensive of those they value.

What have we seen that works?

Vulnerability-based trust cannot be achieved very quickly. It requires shared experiences over time, multiple instances of follow-through and credibility, and an in-depth understanding of the attributes of team members. However, by focusing on the above, I believe a team can dramatically accelerate the process and achieve trust in a much quicker timeframe. Here are some things I have seen that work:

Able:

• A lot of ability comes down to experience, but I think a lot can be achieved through digesting various product resources e.g. blogs, books and videos.
• Although I am new to this, writing a blog does help to distil and reinforce learning.
• Team pre- and post-mortems. These really help build a lot of ability when done as a cross-functional team by making it safe for those that are knowledgeable about the undertaking to identify the biggest risks.You can then improve a project’s chances of success.

Dependable:

• From my experience and relating this to Product Management, I think setting the right expectations is absolutely crucial. Trying to honour timescales and being honest quickly if they look like they are going to slip.
• Saying “no” vs. letting people down. Saying “no” to someone upfront is much better than doing something hastily (and potentially badly).
• Being visible and transparent also really helps, so nothing comes as a surprise.

Open:

• Be willing to share things about yourself (outside of work as well). I did a ‘Pecha Kucha’ exercise with my team where I shared my ‘story’ of how I ended up where I am today. The whole team did this exercise over a number of weeks which really helped to build empathy and trust.
• Creating an environment where people can be themselves. Emphasising how the team does respect everyone’s thinking.

Caring:

• Personality and Behavioural Preferences Profiles. Some of the most effective and lasting tools for building trust on a team are profiles of team members’ behavioural preferences and personality styles such as Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
• Call out people to get their opinions and adapt processes to get the best out of people (often based on the profile as identified in the previous bullet point). One of my team members said to me that they didn’t like brainstorming with post-it notes and thinking on the spot, as they had a reflective personality style. We therefore adapted the process to help get the best out of them.
• Praise/shoutouts.
• I also read in a blog post about a number of Product Managers who use simple caring gestures. One kept a record of everyone’s dietary requirements and preferences, which they then ate together in a post-work chat. Another sent a postcard with a thank-you note for all the hard work to each team member. The postcard was the exact same one that the company sent to the very first members of their community.

As a Product team, we have recently done a lot of work on empathy, which really ties in to the last point of ‘caring’. Being genuinely curious, respecting someone enough to listen, and standing in their shoes (understanding not agreement) are all key parts of caring and — by virtue — trust.

I really hope that you can take something from this article, and at the very least try “braving connection” by sharing something about yourself to your team.