There’s a fundamental need for trust in every organization. By building trust within your organization’s teams, you can:
- learn to have healthy debate
- deal with hot-button issues and controversial topics professionally
- get to team-built solutions.
This also helps hold people accountable. If there’s trust, people are much more willing to hold you and your team accountable. Being accountable to each other is important.
One way to build this trust is by having people work toward a common goal or mission. One way I’ve found to build trust and teamwork within an organization is to put people on a mission.
Create a project and have people work together. Give them a common goal that requires them to tap into one another’s knowledge and skill sets to be successful. Give them something they can be passionate about and drive forward together to accomplish or reach.
In these situations, it’s my experience that people tend to get along. They tend to learn to trust each other. They tend to develop rapport and relationship.
I recently had a situation where two parts of the organization were struggling to integrate and optimize their performance together. We put them on a similar mission by taking leaders out of those two parts of the organization and tasking them with accomplishing a very hard challenge together.
We gave them guidelines and parameters of what success looked like but then empowered them to solve it themselves. They quickly learned how to work together as a team. This ultimately solved the larger organizational challenge.
Give people a common mission. Charge people with working together to be successful. This helps build teamwork within an organization.
How have you seen people come together as teams and work strongly toward a common mission?