Respect, Trust & Support

I was in a group the other day where the question of high performing teams and teams vs groups came up again.

An experienced member started quoting research about what makes a team work well. It included the number of positive comments exchanged between members and  a willingness to listen and debate.

This resonated with the simpler model I had in my head, drawn from personal experience. The model is 

respect, trust and support. 

And they fall in that order.

By Respect I man that all members respect each other, their abilities and their contribution to the output of the team. This is the cornerstone, without which the rest is at best wafer-thin, surface only behaviours.

Trust follows respect and per the trust formula builds on the respect. It is includes confidence, levels of understanding each others' motivations, interests and concerns along with aligned interests.

The last piece is support and more specifically the willingness to support and help each other through thick and thin, good and bad. Not surprisingly this this really needs the respect and trust to be in place first.

All in all, I think this is a simpler model to remember and provides something of a litmus test that can be used to assess and coach your teams. If your team is not working then it is unlikely that they supporting each other. This could be because they don't know that they should or even how they can, but might be more fundamental in that they don't trust each other.

If trust is the issue then one can work at how to build that trust and there are plenty of ways that could be addressed. However in considering trust one must look at whether they respect each other because if this is missing then one needs to start further down the chain and help them understand and appreciate each others abilities and contribution.

If you can't build the respect then you need to rebuild/rethink the team!