Building team trust
Featured in the Developing an Emotionally Intelligent Team training manual
By Mike Bagshaw
Category: Emotional Intelligence
Credit price: 4 download credits (Single user)
Trust is one of our basic needs. The more we find it lacking, the more we seek it out. If an organisation can win the trust of the public, it has a strong competitive edge. It keeps its customers, new ones come, key employees stay, and employees have the confidence to carry through innovation. It goes from good to better. Conversely, when public trust is absent, this penetrates the whole of the organisation and its relationship with the customer base. It is as though the organisation is competing against the customers. It may become part of the culture that So-and-So Limited are a joke. Within the company, staff avoid blame for themselves by blaming everyone else. They are careful what they say, so as not to reveal what’s really going on. Communication becomes an exercise in self-protection. Then there is suspicion. What is the other person trying to hide? Staff avoid painful issues, keep agreements vague, and hide behind established procedures so they can say they’ve done it right. Any suggestion of changing the system is rejected with a hollow laugh. It doesn’t take long for frustration, anger and gossip to get a grip. It goes from bad to worse. Trust is needed at all levels in the organisation.
You begin the training activity with an exercise to identify the views of individual team members about the level of trust that they experience in the organisation. After a short break for reflection, there is an input and discussion on the business case for trust. This is followed by another exercise that asks the participants to identify, from their own experience, when it is that they trust people. You then conduct a brainstorm on ideas for building trust and follow with input, exercises and discussions on the main elements of team trust. The training activity ends with a physical trust exercise involving the whole group.
Who is it for: This training resource is intended for use by trainers to enable teams to understand the need for a high level of trust and the behaviours that will build it.
| Resource Type: | Activity |
| Min Group Size: | 4 |
| Max Group Size: | 12 |
| Typical Duration: | 02:10:00 |
| No of Pages: | 26 |
Resources: View standard resources for Fenman training activities
Additional resources: A6 sheets of card.
Purpose: This training resource is intended for use by trainers, as a foundation activity representing the essentials for enhancing team EQ, on a team-building event for established or newly-formed teams. It can also be used on management and leadership programmes if the references to teams are adapted for an organisation-wide orientation. It is a particularly powerful activity when combined with ‘”Get real” communication in the team’. The resource assumes that you are working with existing teams, or groups that are about to become teams. However, the activity can be reshaped to work with groups of participants from different teams.
Download the training activity, Building team trust as featured in the Fenman training manual; Developing an Emotionally Intelligent Team