One of my favorite podcasts (EconTalk) recently interviewed the author of The Collective Edge: Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups, Colin Fisher. There were two things about this excellent interview that stood out to me and merit further mulling on my part.
If you talk to me much about management, you’ll know that I’m pretty big on team trust and psychological safety. However, I’m not really big on “team building exercises.” I’ve always been vaguely uneasy about them in ways that I couldn’t clearly articulate. I would participate in (or, on occasion, even lead) such things but I’d do it mostly because I didn’t want to be the stick-in-the-mud that said, “Well, I think this is rather silly.” Who am I to say? Maybe it is useful and I’m just actually a stick in the mud.
In this podcast, Mr. Fisher made an excellent point that resonated with me. “Trust” can mean a variety of different things. Fisher broke “trust” down into two categories. Relational trust, also known as socio-emotional trust, addresses things like personal vulnerability (“If I share this information with my colleague, will they use it against me later?”) or emotional connection (“We all felt happy together about a group accomplishment, so we feel closer to one another”). Task-based trust is a little different, and it’s more common in the workplace setting. Namely, do I trust you to do the work in a manner that is acceptable to me? Do you follow-through on assignments and complete them competently?
Relational trust and task-based trust are not necessarily correlated. You can trust someone on an emotional level, but you may not trust them to complete work-related tasks competently. Team-building exercises address the former and not the latter.
Mr. Fisher makes the point that teams perform better when task-based trust is established first, and then relational trust (which is also important!) is established over time. When establishing trust for a team, Fisher recommends creating “high fidelity task simulations” in which the work is (hopefully) similar to the job description, allowing team members to communicate their competence in a more low-stakes environment.
The second tidbit I got from this podcast is a pointer to Richard Hackman’s paper on “Motivation through the Design of Work” (PDF), originally published in 1976. This discussion centered around how structuring the work has a strong effect on the intrinsic motivation of the team. This reminded me of how good managers often take a very active role in problem framing and decomposition. A good manager doesn’t just create a task, they establish how it fits into the bigger mission (framing) and breakdown the work into ways that make progress clear (helpful for managing both up and down the organization’s hierarchy).
The whole podcast is a great listen, lots of excellent tidbits! Give it a listen.
Photo by Zach Kessinger on Unsplash