Building Trust
The strengthening of relationships, key to healthy team working, requires moving towards greater degrees of trust.
Trust allows us to commit more fully, to invest more of ourselves in the projects we are working on and to develop those one to one friendships that can sustain us and support us through tricky times.
Our ability to trust will depend on all that is external to us; the attitudes and behaviours of those around us, the structures and working culture of the group, as well as our own internalised attitudes borne of our individual experiences.
In order to help create the structures and culture that will help build trust there are a number of things that it will be useful to have happen simultaneously;
- Clear mandates that are referred to on an ongoing basis.
- Ongoing reflection of P&V’s to create a framework for working.
- Looking at individual capacity as well as each person’s understanding of consent.
- Listening to life stories that can develop strength and confidence through shared vulnerability and depth of experiences; understanding where people are coming from.
- Modelling attitudes of kindness, compassion, patience, empathy and inclusivity where everyone is heard and welcomed.
- Encouraging the voicing of differences, disagreements and the resolution of these, accepting differences whilst building consensus; handling conflict well.
- Reviewing projects and development of the team; Keeping what’s working and identifying and letting go of what isn’t.
Individually, it may be worth thinking about the times when we were let down and what impact that had on us and our ability to trust.
A decision to trust within a certain time frame can be a useful way forward provided reviews are embedded in the structure of the team’s operation; this is, agreeing to be led by other’s ideas.