Four Common Issues that Erode Trust on a Team

What if I told you that the secret to a high-performing team lies in its level of trust? In our upcoming episode, we're cracking open the Pandora's box of trust issues in professional environments. We're shining a light on four common trust issues that have the potential to erode the very foundation of your team or organization; special behavior, going rogue, splinter cells, and team tension. We're not just here to identify the problem, we've got solutions too. Tune in to gain valuable insights, practical tools, and even a downloadable worksheet to help you apply these concepts in your own team situations. Remember, a team that cultivates trust is a team that excels, because people are drawn to a trusting environment.

We're going to deep dive into the nuances of these trust issues, and how they trickle down to create tension and mistrust among team members. Learn how special behavior can detract from productivity, why going rogue is damaging, how splinter cells can create instability, and the impact of underlying team tension. We'll also explore the significance of investing in team leaders and the steps necessary to build a thriving team culture. So, whether you're a team leader seeking to create a positive and high-performing culture, or an individual wanting to better navigate your professional relationships, this episode is packed with insights you don't want to miss! Let's journey together on this trust-building mission.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Because sometimes we scratch our head when we look at our teams or our families and we wonder, like why is it working? What have I not done? Is it this person's fault? Is it the circumstances? And these are just some common issues that will be helpful maybe in your work or your regular life, because these issues are common and they're human, and it's when we're bumping up against expectations about what it means to trust, what it means to build trust, to maintain trust, to rebuild trust, and so we want to move to talk about ways that we can really address these common issues in some different ways.

Speaker 2: 0:41

Think of a time when you were on a team, part of a group or in an organization where trust was low. Maybe there was active distrust, the pain of broken trust or a reluctance to fully trust those around you. There are many reasons why trust may be lacking, but we have found that these four common issues can often lead to a low trust environment. Hello everyone, my name is Nathan Freeberg and you are listening to the Leadership Vision podcast, our show Helping Team Leaders Build Positive Team Culture. Our consulting firm has spent 25 years investing in teams so that people are mentally engaged and emotionally healthy. Today in the podcast, we're continuing on with our series about building trust in a team as we discuss the four common issues that erode trust within a team and organization.

Speaker 2: 1:30

Now, these issues might sound familiar to you and you may have even encountered them before. They are special behaviors, going rogue, splinter cells and team tension. In this episode, we're going to define these four issues for you and equip you with some valuable ideas and insights to begin addressing them effectively. As you listen, pay attention to how these four common issues impact your team's trust levels and, ultimately, its performance. We'll give you a reflective exercise to help you recognize your own responses that contribute positively or negatively to trust building efforts.

Speaker 2: 2:04

We also have a downloadable worksheet for you in the show notes or you can find it on our website at leadershipvisionconsultingcom. This worksheet will help you dive deeper into the content that we discuss and provide you with a hands-on tool to apply these issues and to apply these concepts to your own experiences. So let's dive into the four common issues that lead to a low trust environment and equip ourselves with the knowledge and tools to create high trust environments. Enjoy, brian and Linda. What are these four common issues of mistrust, distrust, low trust, and how are we can be aware of them to move forward?

Speaker 1: 2:43

Well, the four common issues are special behavior, going rogue, splinter cells and team tension. And these common issues bubbled up after we started working with many teams and we started to realize this, and it's written right on your worksheet Teams that cultivate trust will have a unique advantage, because people want to belong where trust is practice. High trust teams develop trust by setting clear goals, creating autonomy, providing consistent feedback and supporting work-life alignment. High trust teams pay attention to both the professional and the emotional needs of each team member. When teams trust, each team member responds with behaviors promoting an expectation of trust. Additionally, team members understand the connection between what threatens personal trust and what promotes personal trust.

Speaker 3: 3:36

So teams that get this right teams are actually practicing what trust looks like when trust is high and when trust is low, and so one of the reasons why we pay attention to these common issues is so that they're recognizable, Because trust is viable, trust is flexible, trust responds to the challenges that it faces. Even though there's the presence of fear, trust is still courageous, and so what we're not saying is that these common issues are insurmountable. What we're saying is these common issues are well. They're just that they're common, and once we explain them, you'll realize how familiar they are and actually, probably, how you've experienced all four of these common issues.

Speaker 1: 4:16

Because sometimes we scratch our head when we look at our teams or our families and we wonder, like why is it working? What have I not done? Is it this person's fault? Is it the circumstances? I see, and these are just some common issues that will be helpful maybe in your work or your regular life, so let's talk deeper about this. The first one is special behavior. This is when the behavior of a team member requires unique management or exception and it detracts from productivity.

Speaker 3: 4:53

And so when you think about that, special behavior could be that person who is always on their computer and that's tolerated. Special behavior could be the person that always has a negative opinion, with no accountability or any kind of feedback. Special behavior could be someone who's just always not in alignment for whatever reason, or a person that just doesn't show up, but for some reason that those behaviors are accepted and they're tolerated and it's become kind of normal and that creates tension.

Speaker 1: 5:20

Maybe these are the people, the special behaviors, the people that you know. They don't follow the rules, they don't operate from a place of agreed upon norms, they're doing their own thing. So the behavior is special and not a good special. The second one is going rogue. Going rogue where team members who fake commitment, smiling and nodding right, but go rogue despite an agreed upon action plan. This behavior impacts relational accountability, no doubt. So one of the things about going rogue is people that you know smile and nod, and you know we live in Minneapolis, minnesota, in the heartland of the passive aggressive, and so there is a lot of going rogue because there is smiling and nodding and I think we agree, but they leave the meeting, they leave the agreed upon rules or whatever you're going to follow, and then they go ahead and they do their own thing.

Speaker 3: 6:22

Now going rogue promotes distrust because within a team meeting, this person is actually acting in a way that demonstrates that they're with you, like they believe in what's going on, that they're going to execute on what they're saying, so you believe that this person is trustworthy. They aren't saying anything controversial, they're not raising their hand for any special attention. But then once they leave that environment where they've been practiced or demonstrated that they're trustworthy, they do their own thing. And then the reason why this one is promoting distrust in particular is that over time, you're beginning to realize how untrustworthy that individual actually is by their process of how they're drifting away from purpose, out of alignment. As time emerges, this one can catch people by surprise.

Speaker 1: 7:13

The third one is splinter cells. We all know these ones as well, where they're just fractured portions of the team that follow their own agenda and form alliances. So they maybe haven't even nodded and gone along with it. They're just automatically resistant, and that creates instability and imbalance.

Speaker 3: 7:32

So splinter cells can be the people that are actually present in a meeting. They're sitting together in their own little group. They could be huddled together, they could be off in a corner, but they're even demonstrating that splinter nature within the presence of the rest of their team, and that obviously is promoting distrust. And what makes us even more complex is that not only are they in your presence displaying that they're untrustworthy, then they continue to go on and do their own thing as a group after that meeting is over. They kind of maybe work in clusters, they go talk on their own off to the side. They have their own meetings to follow up the meeting, and this splinter cell may have their own set of values and practices that they align themselves to. What that's doing is it's just causing this constant drift, and this type of behavior is obviously promoting a degree of distrust.

Speaker 1: 8:30

It could even mean they speak their own language, and that could be a different language than the one spoken in the room, or it could be their own vernacular, where they're speaking in a way where not everyone from the out group would even know what they're talking about, and they just blatantly do it. It promotes not just distrust but a lack of inclusion and a lack of belonging. The last one is team tension, team tension. So I want to encourage you to think about when there's just that underlying tension, the tension between team members that's just under the surface and it's there all the time and it leads to unspoken or unresolved issues.

Speaker 1: 9:17

Sometimes there's just that person that shows up to the meeting, shows up to the event and everyone is acting different. Maybe it's because someone's mad at that person, or people don't feel free to be who they are. They're not even promoting the sense of distrust because these couple people haven't figured it out. So it's not just a special behavior, it's. This special behavior can be managed in some different ways, but team tension is just when it. Oh, like you just don't want to go into the office, into the meeting, you have this sense of dread because it's under the surface, you can't quite name it, but you're wondering about it.

Speaker 3: 9:59

What's unique to team tension in how it's promoting distrust is that there are three different dimensions to team tension. There's the team tension that exists before the team meeting, like it's always there. People walk into the room and they're already tense. There could be team tension that exists within the team meeting that's like present tense tension, and that could be people that are offering up disagreements. They're offering up critical counterpoint that they know is going to create further tension. They could present counterfactual information.

Speaker 3: 10:32

It could be an emotional disposition, but that type of team tension is happening in the here and now. And perhaps another, maybe more fearful type of team tension is the team tension you know that's going to be carried out of the room downstream. Or maybe you know that this person or these people are going to continue to create tension downstream over time and you're going to have to be putting out fires and maybe like trying to do an end around over and over and over again. So there are these three different types of team tension as well. Each one of them has its own unique characteristics and behaviors, but all in all, it is really promoting this high level of distrust.

Speaker 1: 11:18

So, with these four common issues, we want you to consider where your mind went, even as we were defining and describing them, because maybe an example just popped into your mind like oh, yeah, that's oh. Now I have a way to name it, to label. Our brains love to name things so that we can understand them a little bit better. This exercise allows us to really start to tag our experience like oh, that was special behavior, okay, that one was going rogue. Team tension, team tension from this year to that year and maybe a little bit of splinter cells there.

Speaker 3: 11:54

So, as you're thinking of each of these four common issues, maybe you want to put a star next to the one that really captures your attention, like this is your lived experience, you have stories to back it up, and maybe then, after you've identified one, maybe two, think about how you responded in that situation. Was your response generative, like was your response part of the problem solving, or was your response maybe even contributing because you just didn't know what to do when these common issues come up? How are you feeling? How are you feeling in that moment? Are you aware of the feelings of other people? Just kind of be more aware of your natural reaction to each of these common issues and then, secondarily then, how do you respond? Like, for example, if your best self were to show up into a team situation where one of these common issues was happening, how is it that you could be a contributor to the solution, to building trust, when one of these common issues is being raised?

Speaker 1: 12:56

So this is our challenge to you Be the consultant on your own life, be the observer and begin to speak into what you see from your perspective. Maybe this is giving language to understand something that happened several years ago where you said I'm never going to be a part of an environment like this, and you have actively sought to eliminate some of these common issues right when they start to grow. But what are you observing? What would you want to speak about it? Which one resonates with you? Do you find yourself in environments where this one always rears its ugly head? We just want you to interact with this material that way. But, nathan, I want to ask you what captures your attention in these four, as far as where your mind goes or where your memories go, as well as how you're leaning forward and how you're parenting for our children.

Speaker 2: 13:50

Yeah, Well, it's really interesting. I had kind of three thoughts. One I'm guessing that these special behaviors or these common issues don't happen in isolation, like it's only one at a time. There's some overlapping of them, some combination of them, but thinking about them one at a time can be really helpful. And so in doing that, I think about this idea of special behavior.

Speaker 2: 14:15

I know in different teams I've probably been the one doing some special behaviors and how justified I could probably feel with that and, as a result, maybe not realizing the impact that that has on a team, perhaps the distrust or mistrust or whatever that that would create. And so I would, I guess, challenge our participants here as they are thinking about you know, these different behaviors is like. What does that make you feel? Like, when you think about like your own role in some of these things, and try not to get too defensive. We're all probably guilty of all of these at one point in time. We've all observed them at one point in time. But I think the point is to figure out how do you contribute to move out of these things so that these things aren't present. So let's go on through my head and I think that even in leadership vision. There's probably lots of examples we could talk about over the years of how all of these things have been there in one point or another, right.

Speaker 1: 15:13

Because these issues are common and they're human, and it's when we're bumping up against expectations about what it means to trust, what it means to build trust, to maintain trust, to rebuild trust, and so we want to move to talk about ways that we can really address these common issues in some different ways.

Speaker 2: 15:36

Thank you for listening to the Leadership Vision podcast, sharing our expertise in the discovery, practice and implementation of a strengths-based approach to people, teams and culture.

Speaker 2: 15:45

For the past 25 years, we have been investing in team leaders to build healthy team culture and we would love to talk with you about anything that you heard in this episode or any of our other online resources about how we might help you build a healthy, positive, overachieving team culture.

Speaker 2: 16:04

You can reach out to us at connect at leadershipvisionconsultingcom or find us on the website leadershipvisionconsultingcom, or join us on social media and talk about what you heard here, and we would really actually appreciate it if you could leave us a review on iTunes, on Spotify wherever you get your podcasts or on YouTube and just tell us what you thought. Maybe subscribe. That really helps other people find the show as well and, as I mentioned at the beginning, there is an accompanying worksheet to help you unpack these definitions to give you something to think about. There should be a link in the show notes, but you can also find us at leadershipvisionconsultingcom, go to our blog archives section and, while you're there, join us on our email newsletters. You can sign up to get all of these great resources delivered to your inbox every week. My name is Nathan Freeberg and, on behalf of our entire team, thanks for listening.