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Two Ways to Build Trust Between Teams
The necessity for trust is key. And of course, who do you trust? You trust people that you know. You trust people you’ve had previous interactions with, whether it be the person at the corner store because you’ve interacted with them or somebody that’s on your tight team that you have a history with. Who do you not trust? You don’t trust the people you don’t know. You might trust them if the organization is known to you, you don’t know the teller at the bank, but you know the bank, and so you build that. When you’re scaled into a number of small teams, how do you build trust between those teams?
What we found was there were two really key things. The first was shared consciousness. When you start to take the lid off secrecy, take the lid off people wanting to hold information inside their small tribe, and we had each of our organizations had a requirement to brief what was going well and what wasn’t going well on our video teleconference. That would suddenly give transparency to other people and then you started to understand where they were struggling, when they were doing well. You started to develop an empathy with them. And you also started to build linkages between teams. They would be passing across chat rooms, best practices. We also exchanged people to teams. We took members of other teams and for periods we assigned them to teams. Because once you know one person in another team, you have a necessary link. You don’t need to know that whole team but if you know one person, you say, “Well, I know Bill and I trust Bill and he’s part of that team, therefore that tribe is known to me.” And we found that those linkages were extraordinarily important.
How to Close Information Gaps
Things bleed over. And so what I want to argue is you really need an approach where there is some overlap like Venn diagrams, overlap in responsibilities, overlap in understanding because it’s gaps and seams that produce the biggest challenges in organizations. I’m responsible for this; you’re responsible for that, but in that connection, it can fall into a pit in which problems occur and things don’t happen and everybody says, “I thought you had that fly ball.”
So what I believe in is, in addition to creating this basic shared consciousness, you’re creating conduits of communication across latterly through the organization. And it goes up and down but latterly is really the difference where information occurs automatically. It doesn’t have to go through nine layers of the chain of command, go to the senior people for permission to communicate to the other part. It not only can flow but it’s required to flow laterally. We did this daily video teleconference, but beneath that there were about 15 simultaneous chat rooms running so that as people are talking on the video teleconference, there’s also this web of information that’s being passed between participants who are hearing this and they’re saying, “Oh let me tell you more about this.” Asking about this, doing things. It’s that interaction that is the real key to the success.