How to develop and maintain trust in teams

Teamwork is built on a bedrock of mutual trust, and can only be truly effective when each and every team member works within the climate that this trust engenders. This may be a simple statement, but the diversity of human nature and personality often mitigates against the establishment of the necessary trust. Regularly introducing an effective intervention to establish and maintain trust is something I'd always advocate, no matter how long a team has been together. That regularity needs a selection of tools around which to build the intervention, here are two that would be in my toolkit.

Counter Intelligence is an activity that sets up a complicated working environment, complicated rather than complex. There are a lot of regulations involved, and individuals are required to represent these requirements, despite many of them appearing pointless and irrelevant in achieving the goal. It's this dynamic that makes it very easy for the team, or individuals, to dismiss or ignore information they have been given, and this may ultimately result in a failure to complete the task.  Success depends on each team member being vocal in steering team process whilst trusting that each colleague will do the same. Without discipline this may result in chaos, but with a strong element of mutual trust the team operates in a discernably businesslike way. Trust is a key teamwork value, and Counter Intelligence inevitably leads to discussions about the need for teams to operate within a framework of shared values.

If I want to address how we can create open and respectful working environments that can be built on the platform of demonstrating trust in the contribution of others, I might choose to use Reversal as a significant experiential tool. It's important to me that team members recognise that trusting the contribution of others isn't a recipe for unquestioning acceptance, so I need them to have the tools they need for goal-directed evaluation and respectful challenge. Reversal is a great activity to develop and coach these skills.

 
The kind of questions that arise every time I use Reversal are:

• "What do I do if my contribution seems to contradict what a colleague has offered?"
• "How do I handle the situation where my contribution seems to suggest a change in direction for the team?"
• "How do we achieve a team process that allows for individual differences?

These are big questions, and I would suggest that they are far better explored and resolved within the safety of an experiential activity rather than jeopardising team performance in the workplace.