Build Trust on Your Team

I've been travelling extensively for the last week. Somehow, client work took a priority over blogging. (Imagine that!) I'll fill you in.

Greg Howell and I offer a project leadership program we call the Project Leaders' Studio. This is a program for people who are project managers who want to develop leadership skills. We conduct the program primarily by teleconference. However, during the first part of the program we conduct an in-person 3-day intensive. We just finished an intensive that was quite instructive for Greg and me.

During the intensive we cover a series of topics that we claim collectively represent a shift in the foundation of project management. We start with the issue of uncertainty. While every project manager knows the future is uncertain, most PMs plan for their project as if the plan can be followed. When times get tough, more detail is added to the plan. This only makes the plan more difficult to follow. Our conversation at the intensive centered around the organizations' demand for more detailed planning and an insistence on measuring the PM to a baseline schedule. The PMs concurred producing a detailed schedule helped them manage the project, however in candid moments they lamented being measured on a baseline plan. While Greg and I urge people to improvise with their team, they are officially measured and rewarded on their ability to follow the plan.

We explored many topics: listening, Theory of Constraints, lean principles, DNA of the Toyota Production System, capacity-delay curve, and autonomic control. The most impacting topic was trust. We've explored this topic on many occasions, but none as clear as this one.

Most PMs know their team is only as strong as the trust that exists among the team members. We continually hear PMs say that the team is temporary, therefore there's no good reason or not enough time to invest the long hours in building trust. (We really think that this is a cop out. People don't know how to build trust.) Patrick Lencioni describes trust as the foundation of all functioning teams. As we explored the basis for trust, it looked more like a small investment that would yield a big return.

We have two favorite books on trust. Building Trust in Business, Politics, Relationships, and Life, by Rober C. Solomon and Fernando Flores and The Trusted Leader, by Robert Galford and Anne Seibold Drapeau. From the two books we have created a set of exercises that a PM can follow to develop skills at swiftly establishing trust on a team. Have a look at one of the four sessions on trust from our series: Granting Trust. There are three other studio notes on the subject of trust: cultivating commitment-making, producing trust, and repairing trust.

We learned two lessons during the intensive: first, people only hope that trust develops on their projects, and second, trust is too often the happy accident of an early breakdown in trust. Our conversation during the intensive dwelled on the seeming inaccessibility we have as PMs to the underlying sources of trust. Thankfully, by the end of the conversation the PMs could see practical actions they could take.

Have a look at the notes on Granting Trust. Try the exercises on your project. We think Pat Lencioni hit the nail on the head…the foundation of all high performing teams is trust. There is nothing more important for you to do as a project manager than to build and preserve trust among your team.

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