Fostering trust

• What causes lack of trust in your organization?
• Are some of your colleagues hyper competitive?
• Or is your culture divisive?
• What aspects of either can you influence or change.
• Do your superiors play people off against each other?
• Is there a rule-by-fear atmosphere?
• Are people overly concerned about protecting their backsides?
• Do you and your colleagues feel threatened?
• How is this a leadership opportunity for you?
• If you focus on what others are doing, you might see this as a problem. But if you focus on what you could do, you might see it as a leadership opportunity.
• Can you devise a strategy for minimizing the factors undermining trust?
• What incompatible actions can be encouraged to displace the counterproductive ones?

Steps to enhancing team cohesiveness

• Low trust suggests, in part, too much of an internal focus.
• Can you focus on an external enemy to increase solidarity?
• What other things might you have in common?
• Can the team create a vision to motivate people to work together?
• Can you agree what would be in it for each team member to trust each other and be more trustworthy?
• Can the team define precisely what it means by trust and how it would like to see team members behave?
• Can you agree a set of ground rules that everyone live by?

A political approach

• Can you trust some of your colleagues more than others?
• Could you form a coalition with them where you each agree to follow a code that is conducive to building trust?
• Then could you recruit other colleagues whose membership is conditional on following your trust principles?
• If you set an example for the rest of the organization in terms of better performance, you might then have ammunition to influence the culture as a whole to change. Your group could be a pilot project. And this could be a leadership opportunity for you.