Only 41 percent of team members believe caring, trusting, and supportive relationships exist with their peers. Fifty-eight percent of employees say that they trust strangers more than they trust their own associates at work. Building relation- ships among team members on a foundation of commitment and empathy is critical to providing an environment of forgiveness and caring enough to challenge each other. Often teams have pockets of broken trust between peers, and left unchecked, this can develop into deep resentments that erode shareholder value. Yet all too often, the team sits by seemingly helplessly enduring poor results, behavior, and performance. Do you know of a breakdown in personal relationships in your team that is holding back company performance?
Traditionally, bond-building happened when someone walked down the hall and bumped into another person at the watercooler. It was organic. That’s why we hear leaders say they want to see people get back to the office; they want that kind of culture-building to happen. But the problem with this traditional form of relationship-building, which we might call serendipitous bond-building, is that it happens by chance. It’s exactly the kind of accidental bond-building we need to move away from. It was fine in an analog age, but it’s nowhere near effective enough for today. We don’t have time to rely on serendipity when global teams who are expected to perform audacious tasks quickly are thrown together and reshaped constantly, often with no history together and with online platforms as the primary form of engagement. Serendipitous bond-building won’t cut it anymore. Instead, we need leaders like Drew Houston, the CEO at Dropbox, who put their mind to engineering culture, purposefully building their cultures and not letting teams’ connectedness be taken for granted. As we will see in the next chapter, Houston shifted Dropbox to a virtual-first business, moving from ten physical spaces to thirty global neighborhoods, where instead of an office, he had small studios of collaboration space geared for meaningful in-person connection. When Dropboxers get together in the same place, it’s to deepen relationships. But our research shows that leaders like Drew who lean in to engineer the behaviors of their teams are the exception. Indicative of this, only 49 percent of team members respect and value what their peers contribute. Without a basic under- lying commitment of professional respect, it is no wonder we see significant gaps in almost every team in high-integrity professional behaviors like candor. Relationships are the foundation of all productive interaction. Why? Because of trust.
PERSONAL, PROFESSIONAL, AND STRUCTURAL TRUST
Trust exists in three different types: professional trust, structural trust, and personal trust. The way this comes to life the most for me is in an interaction that I witnessed when I was a young man. My first job right out of college was working at a manufacturing plant in Wilmington, Delaware. One day, the union leader came into the office to talk to the new plant manager. He said, “Hey, Joe, I’ve done my research, and I have to say, you’re a pretty good egg. I called around a bunch of other plants you’ve managed, and I’m glad to have you here. But here’s what we need to do. We need to go have a drink.” I recognized how the union leader started off by acknowledging that he has respect for and trust in the new plant manager on a professional basis, based on his reputation of doing good work. But beyond that professional trust, the union leader was acknowledging that they needed to develop a personal relationship and be able to talk on the side when their representatives didn’t want them to. He meant that they needed to develop personal trust, the kind where you can look some- body in the eye and really believe them, know their values, know that they’re being honest, and know they have high integrity and that they care. Then as the union leader left the room, he turned back and said, “All that’s great, by the way, but I’m still likely to make your life hell,” and chuckled. That last statement was about structural trust—accepting that their roles demand different perspectives since the union leader’s job may at times be at odds with the plant manager’s. There are lots of structural breakdowns in organizations: boss and subordinate, functions that may have more power than others, or, like the case with the union leader and plant man- ager, teams whose priorities may sometimes clash. But at the end of the day, that union leader was so right. It’s the personal relationship that allows you to cut through disagreements and structural impediments and build the kind of trust you need to work collaboratively. For example, a head of engineering and a head of marketing are going to see the world differently professionally. As a result, they then have to work together personally to find common ground and to move things for- ward when difficulties arise. Some people think that this is only something that’s done organically or accidentally. That’s not the case. For years at Ferrazzi Greenlight we have been opening teams that have been broken, that have held old resentments within them, and, through targeted work, we have moved them to being committed to each other.
Trust is foundational to change. As leaders and as teams we need to embrace and recognize this. Repeated use of Stress Testing, the teamship practice we described in the last chapter, is a great way to build professional trust, because the more a team exercises candor and spends the time to see what each other is thinking, the more they grow in their respect for each other and stop dismissing each other because of seemingly different beliefs. Thoughts like Well, sure they did, because they were trained differently, and they experienced different things too often lead to a breakdown of trust and to disrespect when they should lead to curiosity. If in a meeting a friend says something you don’t agree with, you might say, “Hey, what are you talking about?” Respect is assumed because you are friends. But if in a meeting someone you don’t know says something you disagree with, you may just stay quiet, thinking to yourself that they have their head up their back end. It’s the personal relationship and the new social contract that allow us to dig deeper to get to the truth. We need to build that relationship, and we need to negotiate the social contract.
