The building block of a great team is trust. Everyone knows it – that’s why there are ropes courses, executive retreats, and hundreds of books about building trust amongst co-workers. In my MBA Leadership class, my teacher shared an amazingly simple and effective technique for building trust on a new team.
We have broken out into teams for a class project. She asked us as a team to go off and answer three simple questions:
- Where did you grow up?
- How many siblings do you have and where are you in the birth order?
- What was the most difficult thing you had to deal with as a child?
The increasing personal nature of the questions astounded me – I went into the exercise skeptical. Would anyone really share anything personal for question 3? My group (and I) surprised ourselves. We spoke about issues about dealing with our parents, to self-image problems as a young child, and even someone shared how a serious childhood illness affected their personality to this day. I was blown away. (You’ll have to ask me in person about my story 
.)
Since then the results have been remarkable. Our team meetings are more efficient and we trust each other more. We move quickly from debate to decision, and move on. I feel closer to these people, these “strangers” that I barely know, than I do some of the people I have worked with for years.
Try the exercise with your team. I bet you’ll be surprised by the results.
Image Credit: notsogoodphotography, Creative Commons
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