Learning to Improve Productivity in Dispersed Teams

Over the last few months, many leaders have quickly learnt to lead a remote team while working from home.  

Back when I was a kid in the 1980s, I attended one of my father’s business classes that he taught at a University.  As an awkward 12 year old, in a class of what seemed like adults, I learnt about vision and mission statements.  It made total sense and I fervently believed all companies needed to have them.

Over the last two articles, we have covered how to foster psychological safety and create meaning for your team to improve performance.  In the final of this three-part series, we will now cover improving connection.

A few years ago, I remember reading a glowing interview with the CEO of a large Australian firm about the organisation’s sharemarket success and his new strategic plan.  Everywhere you turned there was a business magazine promoting the words of the CEO and his ambitious Asian Pacific focused strategy, while he mocked other Australian companies for not following suit.

Over the years, I have worked with many low trust teams to improve their performance.  Repeatedly, I still see well-meaning leaders inadvertently destroy trust in their teams.

On a regular basis, I speak to founders building fast growth companies.

Trust is the cornerstone of business.  It’s the basis of every human relationship, every interaction, every communication, every initiative, every work project and even any strategic imperative you need to accomplish.  

When it comes to helping companies build trust internally, one of the things I learnt pretty quickly is that if 1-2 members of the executive team do not support any initiatives to improve trust then all subsequent efforts will fail.  

Thanks to our tribal ancestry, we see ourselves in terms of other people and groups.  Evolution has taught us that it is beneficial to live in tribes, where we can share out the work of daily survival.

Trust might be a small word, but it’s a huge, complicated topic.  Everyone thinks they know about trust – after all, we make the decision to trust someone almost daily.  But it’s this past experience that stops us from really learning more about trust and doing a better job at it.