Engagement and Trust

How long does it take to transform the spirit of a workplace? Depending on the depth and duration of the struggle, employee morale can be turned around quickly. Healthy, thriving teams are always evolving their environments. Struggling teams must execute a deliberate decision to sponsor change.

Stay in your lane! Teams can achieve impressive success without collaboration. The recipe is simple: work hard, ensure competence, and be nice. As long as everyone makes their contribution, business gets done and, often, the results are good. Greatness, however, is rarely achieved without a commitment to share ideas and resources. But inviting a teammate into your lane means having to be accountable for the overlap. It’s harder work. We all drive differently when there’s a passenger onboard.

Try this exchange if you’d like to boost transparency and accountability on your team. It’s a simple exercise that unveils each teammate’s contribution to the group and a glimpse of the motives that drive their passion for the work. To implement this exercise with your team, follow these five simple steps:

Most teamwork is relationship driven. Everyone has a role and function relative to their teammates’ roles and functions. Yet, each interaction is fueled by a solo decision made in the privacy of your thoughts. Before we collaborate, a few items must be clear:

Classroom teachers can spot them in an instant. The most engaged person in the room sends off energy that elevates the entire group. Beyond standard eye contact and nods of understanding, this teammate absorbs his or her environment. Connections are forged physically, emotionally, and intellectually. What might you do if you wanted to deliver engagement at this level?

Every interaction either adds or subtracts from the trust of a partnership. Whether you give trust freely or require it to be earned, it grows and shrinks continuously. When you look closely into the aspects of interpersonal exchange that populate a typical workplace, the disparity in willingness to take risks amongst teammates makes sense. Consider the three primary drivers of trust: connection, respect, and accountability.

One true measure of engagement is if, in the eyes of your peers, you matter. Whether in a business meeting or an interpersonal exchange, everybody knows what it feels like to be invisible. Your partners might be making eye contact but their attention is on other priorities. Colleagues are checking their smartphones during your presentation. It’s the classic portrayal of “presenteeism” – the body is present but the spirit is not. Consider these three methods to achieve invisibility:

Engaging with unknown partners poses risks. Without the context of a track record, it’s hard to predict the direction collaboration might take. A cocktail of trust, courage, and adventure must be consumed before dancing with a stranger.

It was a battle of emotional immune systems. The team’s leader was burned out. He had been in his role too long without growth or challenge. Each day, he dragged himself into work, put in his hours, produced the minimum necessary to keep his job, left at 5:00 on the nose, and returned home to refuel sufficiently to come back and do it again. Another day…another dollar. Most of his direct reports followed his lead and sleepwalked through their careers…except one.

Gallup’s 30/50/20 metric seems to hold true in any industry. You know the breakdown – in any given workplace, about 30% of the employees are engaged – they would run through a wall for the organization. About 50% of the employees are disengaged. They’re not really hurting the business with intent. They come to work, do their jobs, and collect their paychecks. These are not the folks, though, you’d ask to go the extra mile. And then, there’s the 20% of the work team that is actively disengaged. Not all of these employees are intentionally trying to harm the workplace. In most cases, they’ve simply decided to devote the bulk of their energy to perpetuating toxicity.

A hand shot up during a recent Team Clock workshop.  Having just finished reading a best selling business book focusing on team dysfunctions, she expressed confusion about the relationship between trust and conflict.