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.  

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.  If you want to learn more about this, check out my book TRUSTED to THRIVE: How leaders create connected and accountable teams that unpacks it all in more detail.

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.

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.

In today’s pressure cooker business world, there is greater uncertainty and risk for people and organisations.   It’s during these turbulent and unpredictable times that trust issues begin to surface, sometimes unbeknownst to leaders.  Used to the times when things were predictable and the stakes low, leadership didn’t even need to consider trust.  But throw in some instability and fear, and all of a sudden trust problems can become a strategic execution derailer.

Take two teams.  One has team members who are low in trust, while the other is high in trust.

Despite what collaboration software experts would have you believe, few companies have big issues with trust within teams. When it comes to improving trust within organisations, the number one issue I have found is collaboration across teams.