Breaking Down Walls, Building up Trust

In 1986, the book “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” launched and quickly became a bestseller. The book is filled with many examples of lessons we all learned as five-year-olds that apply equally well throughout life, but one, in particular, seems to ring especially true when it comes to working effectively as a team:     

When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together. 

In some ways, this nugget sums up what it means for a High Value-Creating Team to co-create value for all the stakeholders across its ecosystem. Co-Creating is one of the most essential disciplines in Peter Hawkins’ Five Disciplines of High Value-Creating Teams. And as executive coaches, we often find it’s the discipline that leadership teams need the most help strengthening. 

Moving from Purpose and Mission to Action 

The Five Disciplines model guides teams through the process of developing a focus on high-value creation. The Commissioning discipline helps the group aligns on its purpose, answering the key questions, “Who are we here to serve, and how?” With a defined purpose, the team leverages the Clarifying discipline to answer the question, “What is the compelling challenge we’ll work together to address?” clarifying their mission, vision, values, and goals. 

Those are essential foundational elements, but now the team needs to move from purpose and mission to action. That is where the Co-Creating discipline comes into play. 

Co-Creating is about defining and adopting specific ways of working together to create more value for every stakeholder the organization impacts. It’s typically easier said than done, especially since it requires some fundamental elements that don’t naturally occur within a team, such as:   

• Holding each other mutually accountable for collective goals 
• Adopting new ways of working with people they may not know much about  
• Committing to engage with each other honestly and openly  
• Truly trusting each other, even when intimacy may be lacking 

• Breaking out of their own silos and working collaboratively  
   

When you think about it, it’s not surprising that these things don’t happen naturally within teams. After all, most teams are collections of people who don’t know each other very well. 

 Even as they begin to work together, the format and cadence of their gatherings tends to keep up (rather than knock down) the walls that divide them. Worse, when they aren’t together, they spend much of their day immersed in their respective functional areas—not focused on collective goals. It’s little wonder that silos are the hallmark of most modern companies. 

Tearing Down Silos, Building Up Trust 

A physical silo has walls that are meant to keep certain things in and everything else out. Within a company, a silo’s virtual walls keep team members from knowing what others are doing and inhibit their ability to communicate with each other. As a result, it’s difficult to build trust in a siloed organization. And without trust, a team can’t co-create value very effectively. 

Trust is the foundation of working well with our coworkers. Without it, we can’t do what author Robert Ludlum advocated: watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together. Lacking the intimacy that trust requires, team members instead do the opposite: focus on their own lane, avoid building bonds, and operate as separate entities with mutually exclusive (or even competing) priorities and goals.  

That’s why teams often struggle to collaborate, or worse, unintentionally work at cross purposes or actively compete for resources. We hear examples of organizations where the sales team sells contracts that manufacturing isn’t prepared to fulfill, or where production blames engineering for designing a product that they can’t produce efficiently. Our first instinct is to wonder how that happens. Yet, without the intimacy that trust depends on, it’s actually bound to happen.   

Breaking down silos and building up trust is essential for any team, at any time, but especially at times of significant change. If a company is going through a major transformation or a shift in strategy—embracing new ways of working while keeping the current business operating effectively in parallel—there will be tension between those on board with the change and those who aren’t. That tension typically manifests itself through each group digging in its heels and retreating to its silos.  

One of the most effective tools we’ve used to help High Value-Creating Teams co-create value is the Trust Equation: 

This equation says that trust is a function of how much credibility each person has with the others, how reliable each party is perceived to be, and how much intimacy has been built (all combining to form the numerator)—which is reduced by the degree to which each person is focused on themselves, their needs, and their interests (the denominator). By defining the concept of trust in more concrete terms, the team now has the ability to evaluate each component and intentionally find ways to enhance the numerator while mitigating the denominator. 

Coaching Teams on How to Co-Create 

What typically drives a team to realize it needs help with the Co-Creating discipline is a noticeable lack of progress in achieving its objectives. We often hear the lament, “We’re stuck!” Other times, team members recognize their engaging in behaviors that inhibit working together, resulting in conflict that the team doesn’t know how to resolve.  

Systemic Team Coaching can help a High Value-Creating Team break the cycle and learn to co-create more value for its stakeholders. Through techniques like hands-on exercises, small group discussions, breakout activities, individual reflections, and group report-outs, a Systemic Team Coach helps team members articulate what’s holding them back from collaborating well, identify the risks in not finding a path forward, and formulate concrete agreements that help them move forward in turning their purpose into action.  

A Systemic Team Coach also can help High Value-Creating Teams actively work on each component of the trust equation, recognize where any element of trust is lacking, and take actions to raise the value of the numerator while reducing the effects of the denominator. Sometimes, breaking down the walls starts with simple steps like having each team member articulate something they admire in each of their colleagues—a powerful way to develop the trust that enables colleagues to work together in creating value for everyone they serve.  

The Leadership Advisory Practice at Odgers Berndtson helps organizations discover and develop leaders, strengthen value-creating teams, and prepare for what’s next. Learn how our highly experienced team of assessors and coaches uses a holistic approach to help your organization achieve more.