Exercise building trust in teams

A simple exercise for building trust in your team.
(See Annex 10 of The Values-driven Organisation)

The Trust Matrix Exercise
If you want to evaluate the level of trust in your leadership team or any other working team, hold a workshop and ask each member of the team to identify which elements of the Trust Matrix they believe are the strongest and which are the weakest in the way the team operates.

Give every person five points to allocate to the strengths and five points to allocate to the weaknesses—you can use green and red dots for this purpose (green for strengths and red for weaknesses). They can allocate the points in any combination to each of the 12 components of the Trust Matrix. Give them a few moments to think about how to allocate their dots. In a large team, people can work in pairs. As each person or pair declares their allocation of points, they have to explain to the rest of the group why they chose to allocate their points in that particular way. When everyone has placed their dots on the chart, add up the results for the whole team. You will see immediately which elements of the Trust Matrix are most lacking and which elements are most present.

Based on these findings, begin an open dialogue on how to build on the strengths and minimize the weaknesses that the team has identified. At the end of this discussion, ask each member of the team to state which elements of the Trust Matrix he or she is least competent in and what he or she proposes to do to improve. This exercise makes the whole team accountable for improving the level of trust.