Today, more than ever, teamwork is increasingly recognized as an essential skill to foster collaboration, deepen trust, promote engagement, and manage the never-ending process of change in organizations and on teams. In fact, when teamwork is present, people step forward and do their best work, together, efficiently.
It has been discovered that the presence of teamwork makes people align around a common purpose, take risks, think outside of the box, support each other, and communicate openly and honestly. This also helps teams build trusting relationships, disseminate information better and talk with each other.
The same applies at the workplace as well, where employees seek trusting relations. However, the reality is that despite the importance, need, and demand for them, teams struggle to build and sustain them for the long term. In all teams, trust will be built and trust will be broken; this comes with the territory of human relationships. So how can we instill teamwork into a team of strangers?
The Reina Dimensions of Trust: The Three Cs
The Reina Dimensions of Trust provides a practical, behavioral-based framework that helps people raise their awareness of trust. Specifically, it gives teams a common language to talk about trust-related issues constructively, to take thoughtful action on them, to sustain trust over time, and to enable them to take trust to the next level.
#1 Trust of Character
This sets the tone and direction of teamwork. This dimension of trust represents mutually serving intentions and is the starting point of a team relationship. When teams have Trust of Character, each member has faith that the others will behave as expected.
As the Center for Creative Leadership states,
team members care about one another as people and hold each other’s best interest in mind. This is the foundational dimension of trust teams need to be effective.
Team members build this trust when they do what they say they will do, engendering a mutual view of reliability and trust within the team. Any member who can’t deliver steps up, renegotiates the task and is supported.
#2 Trust of Communication
This fuels teamwork and makes it safe for team members to talk with each other directly, and not only to provide information to one another, but work through issues and concerns and offer feedback in the spirit of deeper learning and growth.
Through Trust of Communication, teams practice transparency and they communicate openly and honestly. In general, the team members feel safe to admit mistakes and know where they stand with one another. Trust of Communication creates an environment of collaboration that teams need to thrive.
#3 Trust of Capability
This opens the door for team members to contribute, to use their knowledge to make a difference. Team members build this type of trust by using the skills and abilities of one another, seeking each other’s input, engaging in decision making, and teaching of new skills. Trust of Capability enables the innovation teams need to be competitive.
Together, these three dimensions of trust help teams understand the behaviors needed to build and sustain trust and foster their trustworthiness.
