Trust and communication go hand in hand. Leaders need to build trust, and as Kouzes & Posner point out, leaders need to take the risk and trust their employees first. Once employees see that their leader trusts them enough to share individual as well as company information with them, employees will be much more likely to take this risk as well. Trust also leads to collaboration between individuals, teams, departments etc. K&P call collaboration a social imperative and state very clearly that it is mandatory to get anything done.

In a climate of trust, employees can also feel more comfortable exploring, reaching out into the unknown and becoming more creative. Imagine a work environment where you could lose all your fears about being punished for making a mistake or coming up with an idea that has never been tried before. How great would it feel if others, including your boss, listened, evaluated, maybe even took your idea one or several steps further, taking it even further out into the unknown. Then, after discussion, the team agreed that under the circumstances the idea did not work but all agreed that it was a good discussion and will lead to future innovations. If I were in such an environment, I would feel invigorated, proud of the team and totally anxious to come up with many new ideas in the future.

Now imagine the opposite. An environment where risk taking and trust is not a habit and ideas that are too “out there� are belittled. It would be hard for me to gather my courage to speak up, knowing that the answer would not be designed to acknowledge my willingness to take a risk and trust that my manager and team are willing to be creative with me. How would you feel in such an environment?

K&P introduce the term reciprocity in this chapter. You can call it “treat others as you would like to be treated�; walking in someone else’s shoes for a while or returning favors others have paid you. I think this is a very important concept and teams cannot be successful and prolific without it. When I know and can count on team interaction being a constant give and take, I can but my fears of being taken advantage of aside and concentrate on giving my full support to the leaders and team members. One example I thought of where reciprocity did not exist (I think it applies here) is not receiving credit for work done. I have been in some situations where I was asked to create concepts or documents as part of a team or for a manager. The work that I created was deemed acceptable and it was included in a presentation. My manager presented the information, with some team members present, without so much as acknowledging that anyone else but him had worked to gather the information, create the analysis and presentation. It was very discouraging and my willingness to work cooperatively with this manager was greatly diminished. This was a negative example. What examples can you think of that showed how reciprocity was practiced and created a powerful team development?

The final term I would like to highlight is (the metaphor of) the jigsaw puzzle. For anyone who does not quite understand the team & collaboration concepts, I think this is an excellent picture. In the text, K&P state that each person has piece of the puzzle, and together they can put the puzzle together. I think it also works when you change the wording slightly to “each person is a piece of the puzzle�. All the people together make up the puzzle, or team. If one person is missing, does not contribute or believe in the common purpose, the team’s work or project may not succeed. What a powerful picture, I need my team and my team needs me, otherwise the puzzle (work) cannot be completed successfully. Do you have an example how you have had or have been a piece of the puzzle?

One more thought. This chapter in light of current performance evaluations in my company:

In my company, performance evaluations are done on an individual basis. Each employee has to list their actions, accomplished tasks or completed projects and is then evaluated on these individual accomplishments. Teamwork is on the list of competencies to be evaluated, but it is not an overarching evaluative factor. Nor is it weighted heavily enough to make a significant difference in the evaluation. I would argue that, in order to build truly cooperative teams and allow employees to focus on making their colleagues, as part of their team, successful, this practice needs to be completely revamped. In the framework of this chapter, evaluating each employee primarily on their own contributions is counter productive to building collaborative, trusting teams. It simply does not create an atmosphere where the individual can let go of the practice of one-upsmanship and feel good about the team contribution. How do performance evaluations work in your company?

Claudia Beermann