Does it matter if your team trust one another? You bet it does! Studies consistently show a strong correlation between trust and performance in teams. Teams who trust one another have deeper discussion, greater team cohesion and research shows that highly cohesive teams are more successful. Perhaps not surprisingly, research also shows that trust is even more important when the task the team is working on requires them to work closely together. 

Recognition has been shown to have the largest effect on trust: a simple “well done” to a colleague, as close as possible to the event you are saying well done for, is highly effective.  Understanding, and believing in, the skills and capabilities of your fellow team members helps too, as does alignment behind a common team goal and purpose (but only when the team believe both are achievable, which is a strong argument for co-creating those). Developing shared norms and ways of behaving, sharing personal values, opinions, and feelings with colleagues, being open and vulnerable, asking for the help and contribution of others, and engaging in that help, all increase trust – this tends to be a re-enforcing cycle: the more colleagues trust one another, the more they feel able to be open and vulnerable; the more open and vulnerable team members are, the more trust builds. A Google study found that their managers who “express interest in and concern for team members’ success and personal well-being” outperform others in the quality and quantity of their work. Open communication and sharing of information is another re-enforcing cycle that builds trust. Feeling heard works too – so working on the listening skills of the team, giving everyone the opportunity and space to say their piece, builds trust as can simply spending time with each fellow team members away from the work environment.

Trust is equally important in driving the effectiveness of a team that comes together for a short period of time, for example a project team, as a team that works together on an on-going basis. The challenge of establishing trust is greater in those short-term teams as building trust generally takes time. However, there are lots of examples where this can be achieved, and where high performance is essential: in the emergency departments of hospitals, for example, the cockpit of an airplane or a US Navy SEAL team. There’s no reason why this can’t work in business too.

And trust builds performance in the wider environment: companies that report high levels of trust (compared to companies where trust is low) also report 50% higher productivity, 106% more energy at work, 40% less burnout, 74% less stress, 13% fewer sick days and 29% more satisfaction with their lives. 

Trust is hard earned, but easily lost. But building trust matters in so many ways.

“Purpose driven companies make more money, have more engaged employeees, have more loyal customers and are better at innovation and delivering on transformational change”

(HBR – The Business Case for Purpose)

Goals are logical, tangible. Purpose, why we do what we do, is less tangible, more emotional. This difference might be the reason we tend to spend a lot more time on setting our goals than thinking about our purpose. And yet, did you know that companies with a clearly articulated purpose, that is understood and connects with the rest of the organisation report a wide range of tangible benefits: higher levels of employee satisfaction and engagement, higher levels of customer loyalty, but most importantly research by the Harvard Business School in a global survey of 474 executives found that they also enjoy a significant improvement in performance and this has a direct impact on the bottom line.

Organisations might think about their purpose as part of a strategy exercise, or when developing their vision/mission. Identifying your business purpose is just the start. So many purpose statements are meaningless because actions don’t follow the words: As Michael Beer, the Emeritus Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School states: “You can’t just adopt it…. it has to be driven, operationally and in depth, by the CEO and the top leadership team. That takes a lot of skill and understanding to do well, which is why so few companies really can pull it off”.

The power of purpose is also true for individuals, and teams. Individuals and teams perform better if they are clear about why they are doing what they do. There’s the apocryphal story of the cleaner, sweeping the floor at NASA who was asked what he was doing. “I’m helping put a man on the moon” was the answer.  I was talking to a H&S leader the other week. They were lamenting the fact that people often see H&S as a set of rules and regulations that get in the way. When I asked why they do what they do, they told me “it’s my job to make sure everyone gets home safely, every night, to their families”. Their motivation to do a good job increased significantly when they were able to express that. It’s interesting to see how much more impact purpose has on performance than financial reward.

Finding your corporate ‘why’ can unlock the potential of your organisation. Finding your own personal ‘why’ can unlock your own potential. Helping your team find their ‘why’ can unlock theirs. So, if you want to drive performance, why don’t you start thinking about ‘why’ you do what you do?

Lewis Carroll’s Alice asked the Cheshire Cat: “Would you please tell me which way I should go from here?”. The cat’s reply, “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to”.

This is a perfect example of the importance of setting goals. All great leaders, it seems to me, have a view of where they want to get to. Whether we call it a goal, a vision or mission, the start point is to know what you want the future to look like. The clue is in the name, leader: you have to be leading someone somewhere.

“Where do you want to get to?”, “What do you want to achieve?” is my start point for most coaching conversations. It’s also where I start when discussing strategy. I prefer this initial phase of goal setting to be unconstrained – I just ask you to decide who/what you want to be/do. Then, given everything that’s going on around you, we work out what you need to do to make that happen. Of course, there is an alternative approach: take a look at the world around you, work out what’s possible given challenges that surround you – and set your destination. However, I think great leaders set their own direction, rather than have the world choose it for them.

Whilst knowing where you are heading is a great start, it’s not enough. In my experience, working with a wide range of business leaders, compelling goals align their business (what’s in it for the company) with their professional (what’s in it for my future) and their personal (what’s in it for my family/friends) goals. Compelling goals need to be as appealing to the followers as they are to the leader: no goal is complete until it excites you, your company, your boss, your team, the board, customers, suppliers, family, friends, colleagues….. a great goal works for, and excites, all of your stakeholders.  

A great goal is able to pull off the trick of being many things, to many people.

For a goal to be compelling it needs to be expressed as a ‘towards’ statement, rather than ‘away from’. By that I mean you should express your goal as something you want have happen (towards). Never write a goal as something you don’t want to be/have (away from). The ‘mind trick’ here is that, with a towards goal, the closer you get to to your goal, the more compelling, energising, exciting it becomes as you approach the finish line. With ‘away from’ goals, as you move further away from where you don’t want to be, the impetus to sustain your energy declines and effort reduces. Away from goals rarely end up being achieved.

The benefits of compelling goals

Compelling goals are powerful in so many ways, here are a few: 

• take a look at your to-do list. Remove all of the things that have little or no impact on your goal
• when you’ve got too much to do, and not enough time in which to do it, take a look at that infinite to-do list and ask yourself, “which one task, if I complete it, has the greatest impact on achieving my goal?”. Then work on that. When you’ve completed it, repeat the question.
• with your team, identify the core set of tasks that have the greatest impact on the goal. Once you’ve got those, focus ruthlessly on them: don’t let the day-to-day distract you. (I don’t suppose you’d be surprised to hear that too often I go back to teams a few months after our sessions only to be told, “we haven’t been able to get to those yet, we’ve been too busy”). What chance do you think they’ll ever have of achieving their goal?
• but perhaps the greatest benefit of having a really compelling goal, for your self and/or your team, is that in those challenging times when we all have too much to do and not enough time in which to do it, you might be asking yourself “why do I bother?”. If you’ve got the right goal then just take a look at it and you’ve got your answer. There’s ‘why’, right in front of you. Great goals sustain you in those downtimes.

So, it may sound easy: write a goal. Take it from me, it isn’t. I recently spent 2 days with a senior team writing a goal for their business. In coaching conversations, I can easily spend 3 or 4 hours getting to a really compelling individual goals. But once you have one, you’ll be able to answer Alice’s question: choose the path that takes you towards your goal.