Why the Talking Stick Creates Trust
The morning news is celebrating a minor triumph of civility in the United States Senate. Senator Susan Collins helped broker a (very) short-term deal by using a talking stick – a centuries-old example of early social engineering from Native Americans.
What’s interesting here is not the agreement itself, but how the use of the talking stick creates trust.
The Nature of Trust
Interpersonal trust is a bilateral, reciprocating relationship based on risk-taking. Let me unpack that in simple English.
Trust requires a trustor, and a trustee. The trustor initiates the relationship by taking a risk. The trustee then responds, or not, by being trustworthy. The players than reciprocate roles – it becomes the trustee’s turn to be the trustor. And so on.
As a visual metaphor, think of a simple handshake; one person extends their hand – the other (usually) responds in kind. A minor social ritual, but of the type that plays out dozens of times a day in simple respectful, reciprocating gestures. It is the stuff of etiquette, among other things.
The Critical Role of Listening
Trust formation follows the rule of reciprocity – but what is the currency of that reciprocity? A powerful component of it is very basic – listening. As in, “If you listen to me, I will listen to you.”
This is a familiar proposition to all of us. In sales, we have “I don’t care what you know until I know that you care.” In fields as diverse as hostage negotiation, terrorist interrogation, and suicide hotlines, we know the critical nature of listening in order to ensure the other person feels heard. (In the field of relationships, you’ve probably been on one end or the other of the familiar line, “Would you stop trying to solve the problem, I just want you to listen to me.”)
I’m not talking about “active listening,” or listening to find out the other person’s position, or to formulate a value proposition. I’m talking about something much more basic and fundamental – listening so that the other person feels heard, validated, understood. This is primal stuff.
The Talking Stick
What the talking stick does is to ritualize this fundamental human truth. The only person allowed to talk is the one holding the stick. The result – even though everyone ‘knows’ that it’s an artificial constraint – is that it works.
We are hard-wired to appreciate the civility of listening – and to respond in return. The talking stick is a physical reminder of a basic rule of trust creation: the critical role of listening. If you let me talk about my issues, I will then let you talk about yours.
It’s a rule all humans seem to respect; and a clever vehicle, even if transparent, for drawing on our better natures to create trust.
How to Build Trust Within a Cross Functional Team
Today’s guest post is from Rick Lepsinger, President of OnpointConsulting. They are long-time friends of ours, and leaders in the field of leadership development. Rick addresses a key application for trust in the business world – cross-functional teams.
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Trust is the foundation of any organization. On cross-functional teams, where collaboration between members of different functional units is a core part of effective day-to-day operations but when no one has direct authority over anyone else, trust is critical. However, it can be more difficult to build in a multi-functional team especially when team members are geographically dispersed.
Building trust among multi-functional team members is a key part of enhancing the overall productivity, profitability, and functionality of these teams.
Recognizing Trust Issues
Recognizing the signs of trust issues is crucial for diagnosing problems as well as guiding any trust-building efforts. Some of the danger signs of low levels of trust on a team include:
- Lack of Involvement. When team members do not share information or involve colleagues in decisions that may affect them.
- Lack of Interpersonal Interactions. When every conversation between team members is “strictly business” and team members do not connect on a personal level.
- Talking Behind Each Other’s Backs. When team members talk about the mistakes of others to everyone except the person who made the mistake.
- Focus on Functional Rather Than Group Goals. When team members are in it for themselves rather than helping one another meet goals for the good of the whole group.
- Team Members Avoid Asking for Help. When team members take on too much themselves and avoid asking for help because they believe that they cannot rely on others.
- Everyone Deflects Responsibility for Their Mistakes. When team members blame others rather than accept responsibility for mistakes or missed commitments.
- Micro-Managing. When team leaders, and even team members, scrutinize the work and progress of others and start to tell people how to do their work.
Odds are that if trust is lacking, then you may notice several of the above symptoms among your team members. So what can people do to build trust and increase the perception of their trustworthiness?
The 4 Essential Elements of Trust
Many of the aforementioned symptoms of a team with low levels of trust can be attributed to the lack of one or more of the following components (ref the Trust Equation):
- Credibility. How much team members believe what a person says.
- Reliability. The extent to which team members “follow through” on commitments.
- Intimacy. The extent to which team members empathize with others and feel they can confide in one another.
- Self-Orientation. How much a team member thinks that someone else has his or her best interests at heart.
Actions to Build Trust
Trust takes time and effort to build on any team. Although not always easy, some methods for building trust in a cross-functional team include:
- Arranging Face to Face Meetings. At least once early in the team’s development, arrange a direct, face-to-face meeting so everyone can put a face to a name. In addition, host online video-conferencing to replicate the characteristics of face-to-face interactions. This provides opportunities for team members to connect and build relationships.
- Partnering Team Members. Have team members at various locations work closely together on different projects. Then, rotate the teams so that everyone will, eventually, be partnered with everyone else at least once. This provides team members with opportunities to establish credibility (by demonstrating competence), demonstrate reliability (by meeting commitments), and build relationships and demonstrate intimacy.
- Clarifying Shared Goals and Common Ground. Self-orientation is greatly improved when the entire team is focused on the same objectives. Common ground creates a situation where it is no longer “your” goals or “my” goals but rather “our” goals, which makes cooperation and collaboration desirable.
- Using Action Plans. Actions plans outline who is responsible for what activity and when that activity is targeted for completion. They can be seen as “contracts” that document agreements. As a result, action plans improve reliability — they increase the likelihood that commitments are top of mind and that people will deliver on their promises.
- Celebrating Wins as a Group. Whenever a team member or the team as a whole has a major accomplishment (meets a particularly tough deadline, makes a big sale, solves a big productivity challenge, etc.), celebrate that win as a team. This provides a forum for team members to recognize the contributions of others and can enhance the perception of credibility and reliability.
- Encourage Team Members to Voice Their Concerns. If a problem is ignored, then it won’t get fixed. Such problems eat away at productivity and erode trust over time. Creating a culture where it is expected and safe for team members to voice their concerns and complaints—and acting on them when feasible—is a major part of improving self-orientation and intimacy among the team. When concerns are constructively raised and addressed, team members will feel that they can confide in others without fear of retribution and that their interests are being taken into account.
Using these methods, it is possible to increase trust between team members on a multi-functional team.
Monitoring Team Trust
It’s important to be on the lookout for the danger signs of low levels of trust. But, identifying specific issues can be difficult for team leaders who are not co-located with all or some of the team members and for Human Resources experts who may not be active members of the cross-functional team.
One way to monitor team trust is to use OnPoint’s GRID survey to collect insights and feedback from cross-functional teams. The survey includes questions on elements that impact trust, such as shared goals and clear roles, as well as questions specifically designed to address the quality of relationships and trust among cross-functional team members to help identify problems so they can be corrected.
For more information and advice about building trust within a matrix organization, contact OnPoint Consulting!
Operating Transparently
Transparency is one of the Four Trust Principles for creating trust-based organizations. The other three are other-focus, collaboration, and a medium-to-long term perspective (aka relationships over transactions). Here’s the business case for transparency.
The article Is Transparency Always the Best Policy? first appeared a few years ago in Harvardbusiness.org. The article is about Paul Levy, President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and the answer to the blog’s question, based on this sample of one, would appear to be a resounding ‘yes.’
In matters great and small, Levy has simply made it an operating practice to behave transparently. His great results may surprise many, but they make a great deal of common sense.
If you are transparent about your activities, you are saying you have nothing to hide. If you have nothing to hide, then people trust what you do.
If you are transparent about what you say, then you don’t risk saying one thing to one person and another to another. You don’t appear to be two-faced; you appear to have integrity—you say the same thing to all persons. (And, it’s a lot easier to remember what you said if there’s only one version).
If you are transparent about what you think, then people can observe your thinking, and see that you are not editing what you say. They feel you are available to them, that you are not segmenting them off.
If you are not transparent in your actions, your words, and your thoughts, then people wonder about your motives. Why are you doing what you’re doing?
What is it you really mean when you say something? And what are you really thinking when you’re thinking?
Suspicion about motives colors every aspect of trust—it affects your credibility, your perceived reliability, and the degree to which people confide in you. The antidote to a bad case of suspicion is transparency. It’s as true in the financial and regulatory world, in the world of negotiation, and in the world of accounting, as it is interpersonally.
So Why Aren’t We All Transparent?
With all the obvious advantages that transparency conveys—why aren’t we all more transparent more often?
There are a thousand answers, varying in particular, but with some common threads in general. At the root of it, I think, is fear.
Fear that others will take advantage of us. Fear that we will be misunderstood, or shamed. Fear that others will see the true inner “me” and thus steal the faux power we foolishly think we maintain by being opaque.
Transparency is both a result of lowered fear, and a cause of lowering fear. Sharing information with another encourages another to share with us. Disclosing information within a company—as Paul Levy did so frequently—begets teamwork and lowers suspicion.
The willingness to be transparent in negotiation helps the other party figure out what it is that you want—so the paradoxical result of taking a risk is that you increase the odds of getting what you want.
Transparency is an invitation to collaboration and connection. It lowers fear, it increases trust.
It feels like taking a risk, but it’s really risk-mitigation in disguise.
Operating transparently isn’t just a hospital procedure.
What Problem Are We Trying to Solve?
An old business friend told me the other day that the thing he most remembers me saying was, “What problem are we trying to solve?” As he put it, “That little phrase is the key to unfreezing more off-course conversations than any other technique I know of.”
I can’t claim invention. I got it from the United Research side of Gemini Consulting, one of several pieces of clever social engineering they brought to business. Here’s how, and why, it works.
How Business Conversations Go Astray
To hear us tell it after the fact, many business meetings follow a logical flow. They start with an agenda or problem definition, data are then presented, discussions held, and conclusions reached. Then pigs fly.
It’s not that those individual elements don’t happen – they do. It’s that they happen like a Tower of Babel, randomly and all at once. When everybody’s got an opinion and a vested interest, and nobody’s a designated facilitator – a description of most meetings – we shouldn’t expect much else.
Have you ever been in a planning board meeting? A condo association meeting? A meeting within your firm’s HR department? An inter-departmental meeting? A sales call with an interested but wary client?
Then you’ve seen the following dysfunctions:
- People pursuing their own agendas as sub-text to a given issue
- Aimless wandering around various problem definitions
- Randomly proposed solutions without grounding
- A social struggle for air time
- An airing of pet peeves as they manifest in the given issue
- A game of dominance and submission playing out in an issue.
And I’m sure there are more. All are forms of incoherence, lacking sequence or structure, generating more frustration from which to feed more incoherence.
It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way
If the root issue is incoherence, then there are several ways to tackle it. You can agree on an agenda. You can enforce sequencing. You can apportion air time.
But one way seems to work better than others. When the babble begins to peak, and the frustration level is palpable, raise your hand, furrow your brow, and ask, genuinely, “Hey folks – what problem are we trying to solve?”
Notice what this simple formulation does.
First, it is socially neutral-to-positive. Logically it has the same effect as saying, “You fools are all over the map – you can’t even define the problem” – but the emotional effect is totally different. You’re not claiming the moral high ground or fighting for your point of view – you’re simply observing a phenomenon, and asking a question.
Second, it’s a very good question. Asking a group to gut-check a problem definition almost immediately elicits an answer – and often it’s the same answer. In which case, collaboration is restored – you all have a common mission again.
And if it’s a different answer, voila, you’ve distilled the essence of the debate – “we have two competing problem definitions, no wonder we were having such difficulties!” In either case, the group becomes re-centered around a dynamic goal – problem definition and resolution, rather than bitching and moaning, or power games.
The net effect of all this is claiming, centering, and norming. A group becomes a group again, with common goals, moving forward, rather than a fractious collection of squabblers.
Give it a try next time you’re in a meeting that’s driving you a little batty – just ask, “Hey folks – what problem are we trying to solve?”