I came across an old post at On Agile concerning the importance of trust within Agile teams. You should read it in full (go ahead, I’ll wait). Trust is such an important aspect of any relationship that without it, your relationships are being built on a foundation of sand and you will not get far.
Within your team, do you see the following characteristics:
- When something goes wrong, the first question is “Who messed up?” rather than “How do we learn from this and stop it from happening again?”?
- Is documentation created as a way to defend against the “Who messed up?” question being asked in the future?
- Are individuals focused on ensuring they do not mess up rather than ensuring that the team’s commitments are being met?
- Are individuals afraid to take action on bold ideas because they are too concerned about what will happen if the idea hits some roadbumps on the way to implementation?
Even if you are best buds with the members of your team, if the type of characteristics above are present, you do not have a sufficient level of trust to function as a team. As a result, productivity is taking hit and you are probably focused on tasks that are more about process adherence rather than product improvement/innovation.
Do you find yourself in this type of gloomy situation? While team members themselves can focus on avoiding “CYA” type of behavior, your managers can have the biggest positive impact on the situation. Imagine if a team meeting is called and the key managers come in and say “Going forward, we do not care if mistakes occur. However, we do care about you learning from your mistakes and improving. In addition, we care about you meeting your commitments more than having the proper paper trail”. Now imagine when the first mistake after this meeting occurs and managment follows through on their statements! By establishing the fact that continuous improvement is valued over the blame game, teams are now enabled to build a trusting environment for themselves.
One of the biggest inhibitors to team trust I find is that incentives in the company are still focused on the individual rather than the team. If we want people to work better together, we need to incentives on that. Creating a sound, surrounding environment for the team can help trust be infused among the members. They we’ll see less of the “CYA” stuff that goes on everywhere. Creating that safe environment is the obligation of the management.