Tan, Chade-Meng - Search Inside Yourself - The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)

Similarly, trust is the essential foundation of a highly effective team. In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team , Patrick Lencioni describes five ways a team becomes dysfunctional in the form of a pyramid. 10

The five dysfunctions, in order of causality are:

1. Absence of trust: People do not trust the intentions of their teammates. They feel the need to protect themselves from each other and tread carefully around others on the team. This leads to the next dysfunction.

2. Fear of conflict: Without trust, people are unwilling to involve themselves in productive debates and conflicts, the type of good conflict that focuses entirely on resolving issues without involving character attacks or hidden personal agendas. Without such healthy conflicts, issues stay unresolved or are unsatisfactorily resolved. People feel they have not been properly involved in decisions. This leads to the next dysfunction.

3. Lack of commitment: When people feel their input has not been properly considered and that they have not been properly involved in decisions, they have no buy in. They do not commit to the final decisions. Ambiguity about priorities and directions festers, and uncertainties linger. This leads to the next dysfunction.

4. Avoidance of accountability: When people have no buy in about decisions, they avoid accepting accountability. Worse still, they do not hold their teammates accountable to high standards. Resentment festers, and mediocrity spreads. This leads to the final dysfunction.

5. Inattention to results: The ultimate dysfunction of a team. People care about something other than the collective goals of the team. Goals are not met, results are not achieved, and you lose your best people to your competitors.

It all begins with trust. The absence of trust is the root cause of all other dysfunctions. Specifically, the type of trust Lencioni talks about is what he calls “vulnerability-based trust.” That is when team members trust the intentions of each other enough that they are willing to expose their own vulnerabilities because they are confident their exposed vulnerabilities will not be used against them. Hence, they are willing to admit issues and deficiencies and ask for help. In other words, they are able to concentrate their energies on achieving the team’s common goals, rather than wasting time trying to defend their egos and look good to their teammates.

“Actually, Dave, we were kind of hoping we could go back to when you didn’t feel so open about exposing all your vulnerabilities to us.”

This vulnerability-based trust is the same type of trust Marc Lesser talks about as being the foundation of an effective mentoring/coaching relationship. Once you learn to establish this type of trust, you can become effective not just as a team leader but also as a mentor and coach.

Start with Sincerity, Kindness, and Openness

Many years ago, I had a manager, John, whom I like and respect a lot. John and I became good personal friends. John left the company we worked for under very unpleasant circumstances, which were very unfair to him, in my opinion. When a new manager, Eric, came in to replace John, I was not happy. Emotionally, I felt resentment toward Eric, but cognitively, I knew it really was not Eric’s fault. So I decided to dissolve all my resentment toward him. By then, I was already a seasoned meditator, so I knew precisely which tool to use: empathy.

Eric was already an acquaintance of mine and I occasionally worked with him on small things, so I knew he was not a bad person. In fact, cognitively, I suspected (correctly, it turned out) that he was a good person, and all I had to do was convince my emotional brain. So during our first one-on-one meeting with him as my manager, I made sure to only talk about personal stuff and to do so with kindness and openness. We exchanged life stories and aspirations. I asked him how he wanted to save the world. The purpose of doing all that was to allow both my cognitive brain and my emotional brain a chance to know Eric as a human being, and to associate him with his inner goodness, so that every time I saw him, my emotional brain would react with, “This is a good man. I like him.”

It worked like a charm. Eric earned my trust immediately by reciprocating my sincerity, kindness, and openness. Better still, I found him to be a very good and admirable person. He had, for example, spent much of his youth doing peace-building work in third-world countries, something he hardly ever talks about but which I enormously respect. By the end of our first conversation, my emotional brain was placated and my thinking brain got to tell my emotional brain, “See? I told you he is a good person!” My resentment toward him completely dissolved.

Within the space of a single one-hour conversation, Eric and I established a strong foundation for mutual trust. We had a very positive and productive working relationship for the rest of the time we worked together, and I am happy to call him my friend.

(True story, names have been changed to protect me.)

The moral of the story is to always have doughnuts at meetings. No, I am just kidding. The real moral of the story is that trust has to begin with sincerity, kindness, and openness, so it is optimally productive to start every relationship that way, both in work and in life. Whenever possible, begin by assuming that the other person is a good person and deserves to be treated as such, until proven otherwise.

The other lesson is that it is useful to always engage the other person as a human being. When establishing trust, I find that my cognitive brain is usually easy to deal with—the hard part is placating my emotional brain. To placate the emotional brain, I must recognize that the other person is a human being just like me. The other person is not just a negotiating opponent or a customer or a co-worker; he is also a human being, just like me. When your mind can operate at that level in every situation, especially in difficult situations, you create strong conditions for mutual trust.

Dr. Karen May, Google’s vice president of leadership and talent—and the most empathetic person I have ever worked with—offers two additional tips for building trust:

1. Practice giving people the benefit of the doubt: Most people do what they do because it feels like the right thing at the time, based on what they want to accomplish and the information they have. Their reasons make sense to them, even if their actions do not make sense to us. Assume that they are making the right choice, even if we do not understand it or might make a different choice ourselves.

2. Remember that trust begets trust: One way I can build trust with you is to assume that you are trustworthy and to treat you that way. When you feel that someone trusts you, it makes it easier to trust them back, and vice versa.

“Will it work even with mothers-in-law?”

Three Assumptions

Whenever I chair a meeting, I like to begin with a practice I call the Three Assumptions: I invite everybody in the meeting room to make the following assumptions about everybody else:

1. Assume that everybody in this room is here to serve the greater good, until proven otherwise.

2. Given the above assumption, we therefore assume that none of us has any hidden agenda, until proven otherwise.