Trust and Team Building

When trust prevails, members with ordinary skills and experience, deliver extraordinary results. Needless to say, ‘Trust’ is essential for a team’s success.. In this context, ‘Team building’ is synonymous with ‘Trust Building’. Importance of 'Team Building' proportionately increases with diversity of team. Diversity of the team is a function of geographies which members operate from, members’ -age groups, genders, races, cultures, skills, experiences, and customers who they server or build the products for.
Trust, team and reputation capital are built over a period of time. Every interaction among the members over the course of time either increases or decreases the Trust.
Manager is responsible to create and maintain the right environment that allows members to build the team. There are many ways to establish this environment. Off site meets including activities such as building rafts, beating drums, hiking, trekking or similar exercises that present members an opportunity to understand one another are one such way. Goal is each member needs to understand what s/he thinks are her strengths & weaknesses and how other members perceive her so that over a period of time
How a member sees herself – Other do not see quite the sameà How others see her, she does not knowß
How a member sees herself – Others agreeßà Un Known area

Such understanding helps the team to work towards building a self-organizing and self-governing team. ‘Team Building’ is a continuous process. Onus is on the manager to ensure this process is not broken.

Improved Trust among the team members directly improves productivity of the team. There are many measures which help one assess how the Trust is among the team.

1. Attrition rate- any voluntary movement out of the team by a team member should be considered as attrition.
2. Escalations (a) Internal escalations (b) external- customer/other groups: emails, ad-hoc
3.#of Innovative ideas/new product/process improvements, what's the expected $$$ benefit or actual $$$ benefit if those ideas are implemented
4.Turnaround time for given size of delivered effort.
5.Defects for given size of delivered effort