Most people at least know of the book “The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team” by Patrick Lencioni.  It has served many a leader well on their journey of building theri team and organizational culture.  Patrick’s other books, The 5 Temptations of CEO, Death By Meeting, and his latest book “The 3 Signs of a Miserable Job” (My personal favorite!) have all been tremendously helpful to leaders who are working to lead with more humility, trust and connection rather than manage with more intensity, stress and frustration.

Yesterday at a conference in San Francisco in my roll as Master of Ceremonies (way fun) I was blessed to be able to introduce him to a wonderful group of IT Service Management professionals.  Even more wonderful I was able to sit on the front row for an hour and take notes as he shared his wisdom and insights on building effective teams.

One of most powerful principles he taught was something he called “Vulnerability Based Trust” and because I didn’t think re-typing my notes for you does his work or words justice… I searched and was able to find this article which does.

The whole piece is wonderful… the trust piece is about half way through.  Click here and ENJOY the whole article.

Vulnerability-Based Trust

The first and most important step in building a cohesive and functional team is the establishment of trust. But not just any kind of trust.Teamwork must be built upon a solid foundation of vulnerability-based trust.

This means that members of a cohesive, functional team must learn to comfortably and quickly acknowledge, without provocation, their mistakes,weaknesses, failures, and needs for help. They must also readily recognize the strengths of others, even when those strengths exceed their own.

In theory-or kindergarten-this does not seem terribly difficult. But when a leader is faced with a roomful of accomplished, proud, and talented staff members, getting them to let their guard down and risk loss of positional power is an extremely difficult challenge. And the only way to initiate it is for the leader to go first.

Showing vulnerability is unnatural for many leaders,who were raised to project strength and confidence in the face of difficulty. And while that is certainly a noble behavior in many circumstances, it must be tempered when it comes to demonstrating vulnerability-based trust to hesitant team members who need their leader to strip naked and dive into the cold water first. Of course, this requires that a leader be confident enough, ironically, to admit to frailties and make it easy for others to follow suit. One particular CEO I worked with failed to build trust among his team and watched the company falter as a result. As it turns out, a big contributing factor was his inability to model vulnerability-based trust. As one of the executives who reported to him later explained to me, “No one on the team was ever allowed to be smarter than him in any area because he was the CEO.” As a result, team members would not open up to one another and admit their own weaknesses or mistakes.

What exactly does vulnerability-based trust look like in practice? It is evident among team members who say things to one another like “I screwed up,” “I was wrong,” “I need help,” “I’m sorry,” and “You’re better than I am at this.” Most important, they only make one of these statements when they mean it, and especially when they really don’t want to.

If all this sounds like motherhood and apple pie, understand that there is a very practical reason why vulnerability-based trust is indispensable.Without it, a team will not, and probably should not, engage in unfiltered productive conflict.

Kirk OUt

“As a leader, you’re probably not doing a good job unless your employees can do a good impression of you when you’re not around.”  ~- Patrick Lencioni