By Dr Julie Smith
Clinical psychologist, best-selling author and social influencer
Do you have a trusting team? Dr Julie Smith explains why trust in teams is a fundamental wellbeing asset and talks to Sophie Ireland, Managing Director of Bridge Partnership about techniques leaders can use to improve it.
Trust is such an important emotion. If you think about it, so many other emotions sit on the shoulders of trust – love, confidence, respect, contentment. Above all, without trust, you don't feel safe. And if people don’t feel safe they will act defensively. It's a natural, evolved response that underpins so much of our everyday lives – and work.
In an article for Harvard Business Review, Paul J Zak – an expert on the neuroscience of human connection and effective teamwork – unveiled some striking findings. Compared with people at low-trust companies, people at high-trust companies reported 74% less stress, 50% higher productivity, 13% fewer sick days and 29% more satisfaction with their lives.
For teams to work effectively, they have to trust one another. But how do you know if there's a lack of trust amongst your team? And what can you do – as a leader – to build a trusting team?
Trust and wellness: the three fundamental traits of a trusting team
Through my work with Bupa on the ‘Better Us, Better World’ campaign, I've been talking to The Bridge Partnership, a consultancy that helps organisations build high-performing, trusting and unified teams who are aligned on purpose and strategy. I spoke to Sophie Ireland, Managing Director at Bridge Partnership for Europe, Middle east and Africa, to get some insights on growing trust among teams, and why it matters.
Sophie Ireland, Managing Director at Bridge Partnership
She says that the first fundamental trait of a trusting team is sharing and enquiring about how others are – honestly. This means being able to talk openly about how you're feeling and how you're dealing with your work and life. And of course, leaders need to set an example by being open about their own vulnerabilities.
Another key indicator is tough conversations. Having tricky conversations is a skill, and the more they can happen openly with the full team involved – rather than in small groups or on a one-to-one basis – the better. Sophie says it's important to get past “the polite stage” and share positions or problems honestly. She also says it's important to hear from everyone. “The difficult part is being open-minded about outcomes, so there is room to get into a deeper dialogue that unlocks a new level of creativity and ideation.”
The final trait of a trusting team is confronting with care. “A tell-tale sign of high-trust teams is that they disagree with one another and don't leave things unsaid,” Sophie tells me. That might sound like a negative trait, but she explains that there is an important condition underlining any critical feedback within these teams: “the presence of a shared purpose that is meaningful to all.”
That means that criticism comes not as a personal attack, but as a helpful confrontation in service of supporting the group to achieve a mutual goal together.
Creating a strong environment where team trust can thrive
Lack of trust creates a defensive environment where people don’t feel able to speak up, which can weaken their ability to contribute positively to a team's efforts. I asked Sophie how The Bridge Partnership advises organisations to help them build a more trusting environment.
The first thing to achieve is psychological safety. “Once teams feel safe, they are more able to bring their full selves into the space and feel included,” Sophie explains. “They say what they really think and feel, sharing ideas and mistakes, and asking for help.”
The second is having a clear sense of team purpose. Sophie suggests posing the question ‘Why does this team exist?’ as a starting point to finding a shared goal that everyone can work towards. “Once the team is clear on their ‘why’ they can use that as a lens to apply to everything they do,” she says. “It helps to create their shared vision, develop strategy and keeps a team on track. Importantly, it should be something more broadly aspirational than ‘making money’ or ‘hitting a target number’ (these are outcomes or results), in order to inspire really high performance. All team members need to be aligned to this purpose and find some personal meaning for it to be really effective.”
Fixing a lack of trust in your team
Talking openly and making commitments to working together are, I feel, critical to building trust, but it's also important to recognise that trust is not built overnight. Trust is like adding marbles to a jar one by one – it grows with small actions and small behaviours. You can't just do an away day and fill the jar. Every action you take is an opportunity to add or take away marbles. It's an ongoing process.
Sophie says her approach is to “create a level of intimacy by members sharing a little more about themselves over time, what they care about, what they value and perhaps their hopes and fears. While that sounds difficult, it is actually relatively easy to achieve, if you are working hard to create psychological safety at the same time. Sharing personal stories about what's important to me or a little about where I've come from and who influenced me is a great way to begin building a level of safety in the team.”
Four ways leaders can help build trusting teams
Sophie talked me through four positive steps The Bridge Partnership recommends for helping leaders establish and build trust in teams. Below she's shared four tips anyone can introduce in their teams to foster deeper trust:
- Teach people to learn about themselves
Each member of the team needs to learn how to be at their best more of the time. That's developed by being curious about your own motivations, triggers and behaviours. Bridge introduces this practice using a metaphor of being ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the box (the state in which you are most effective). We've seen a really positive impact from raising the consciousness of leaders and teams to notice when they are ‘in’ or ‘out’ and developing techniques to change their state.
With this method there are three stages which we call E.T.C. which stands for Emotion, Truth, Choice. Emotion is noticing when you’ve been triggered and asking yourself what you are feeling and what you are telling yourself. Pause and take a conscious breath. Truth is making the effort to interrupt the negative voice in your head that is dramatising, exaggerating, or making things up. Pause and take a conscious breath. Choice is looking at the truth of the situation, balancing that with how you feel about it and making a decision about what you want to do next. - Develop psychological safety
There are simple practices that encourage a level of vulnerability, which in turn brings intimacy and trust in teams. Sometimes this can be a simple process of inviting team members to share what they are like at their best and when they are not. It can also be sharing lifelines, which involves creating a graph of life highs and lows. The graph helps the team identify the individual values of others in the group.
You could also invite everyone to talk about a meaningful object with the rest of the group. This often means talking about family or life experiences of deep importance, which helps to build connection and trust. - Encourage courageous conversations
It's important to develop the ability to facilitate and participate in the kind of conversations that make a real difference. We encourage a three-pronged approach to this practice, which involves making sure conversations stay on track, giving all members an opportunity to share what they think or feel, plus reflecting and inquiring on what others have shared.
- Staying on purpose: this should be simple, but conversations naturally veer off topic. Put someone in charge of keeping the group discussion on track.
- Stating positions: ensure all members have an opportunity to share what they're thinking and feeling about a topic before debating it. This could involve everyone writing a Post-it note or sharing a comfort rating out of 10.
- Reflecting and enquiring: get others to reflect on what someone has shared and enquire further (What is it that you really mean? Why do you feel that way?) to ensure everyone feels they're being seen and heard. It's a great way to build trust.
- Introduce check-ins and check-outs
This is one of the most helpful practices for building and sustaining trust. Create space at the beginning of each meeting for the team to check in with each other. Everyone should have the opportunity to ask themselves how they're feeling and share that. Teams get used to a level of honesty and transparency and that builds trust.
At the end of each meeting, everyone should also be invited to check out. This helps make sure teams have an opportunity to give an honest appraisal of how they feel the meeting has gone. It's a great way to avoid things going unspoken, rather than being moaned about after the meeting.
Openness and vulnerability are key
These are genuinely useful tips for anyone looking to inspire trust and confidence in their teams. For me, a key indicator of lack of trust is gossip. It shows that things are not being aired in the open and it's cyclical, as the gossip-maker is unwittingly telling others they're not to be trusted to be open and honest in a group setting.
I also feel leaders need to be open and honest with their teams about their own values, hopes, fears and failures. Vulnerability is such an important part of trust. We all feel vulnerable at times, and leaders who aren't comfortable with admitting that can be difficult to relate to, or even hard to trust.
There are some valuable insights here and they're not hard to implement. Each one is opening up opportunities to put marbles in the trust jar, helping to build up and maintain levels of trust in teams. As with any wellbeing exercise, don't expect results overnight. But keep at it and the rewards will come.
Trust me.
More about Dr Julie
Dr Julie is a clinical psychologist, best-selling author and social sensation. After running her own private practice for almost a decade, Dr Julie began sharing her digestible, informative videos on TikTok in 2019. Her often-viral videos cover a variety of mental health topics from anxiety and depression to confidence. Dr Julie has now amassed an audience of over six million and is the go-to online resource for mental health tips and tricks. Her debut book, Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? was the bestselling non-fiction book of 2022. Dr Julie features regularly on This Morning and BBC Radio 1 Life Hacks.
