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P ERCEPTION OF WHAT TRUST IS WITHIN A TEAM

4. ANALYSIS

4.8 P ERCEPTION OF WHAT TRUST IS WITHIN A TEAM

I asked the question Tell me about a time when trust was lacking among team members.

Many leaders mentioned the lack of trust towards the leader. One leader said, “the team was unsecure on the leader and his/her abilities”. Another one explained, “there was a mistrust towards the leader. It resulted in a walk-through with the team and the leader”. And many of the informants also mentioned the lack of trust in people to be able to deliver as they were expected to. The informant said, “there was lacking ability to deliver and there was a lack of trust to the team from management. The performance was not good enough and the team didn’t deliver on time”. “There was lack of trust to the quality of the delivery. One person came to me. They couldn’t trust that the other did what they were supposed to do or deliver. I had a tight follow up on each of the resources for a couple of weeks”. “A former employee, I did not trust this person on being able to deliver according to the level that was expected. He quit after a number of improvement initiatives had been initiated with him without results”. Some of the leaders mentioned that people did not believe in the message that was portrayed in the organization or team. The said that they needed to set ownership of the tasks to build the trust back up again. Several of the leaders said that they had a to mobilize with the correct or right people.

I asked the question How would you tell a team member that he/she is underperforming?

All of the leaders said that they would get feedback from others on the performance of the team member. The exemplified with, “I would be based on facts, having asked others for feedback before I addressed the team member”. All of the leaders said that these types of conversations were taken in 1-1 conversations, and also face to face, the person subject to the feedback and the leader. One leader said, “taking the discussion as a 1-1, off course”. Another said, “face to face. To get the body language and the facial expressions visible”. Another example was, “I

would do this in a 1-1, off course, you never do feedback that is negative in a joint session”.

Most of the leaders expressed the need to set an action plan or do follow up on the team member to make sure this does not repeat itself, the examples were among other, “I would also set up a weekly follow up to be proactive”. “I would also say that it is a joint responsibility between the team member and others and I would confront him/her with bring forward an action plan for how to solve this together”. All of the leaders mentioned that they would ask questions to understand why this had happened. And some of the same leaders also said that they were would give examples to the team member for him/her to understand the issue. One leader said,

“I would ask questions, is there a reason for this? What help do you need from me or others?

How are you feeling?”. Another one said, “I would have a transparent dialog with the team member, meaning I would be direct and talk directly about the problem. We need to have a management of expectations. And an understanding of the problem together. I would ask questions on why this has happened.”. Serval of the informants meant that challenging the team member him/herself to be responsible, take ownership, or partly being responsible for adjusting the situation or create an improvement on the situation was necessary for improving performance. One leader stated, “One need to create a sense of understanding of the problem.

And to build on to the solution together, team member and leader”. Another mentioned, “we should together look for improvements”. “I would challenge the team member that we need together make adjustments and for him/her to take ownership of these adjustments”. Setting clear expectations and making sure that these are thoroughly understood by the team member seemed crucial for performance improvements. “I would set the expectations on the assignment and tasks once more. I would ask him or her how do you, yourself, feel about your own performance?”. “And off course set clear expectations that are understood by the employee”.

I asked the question Communication and leadership go hand in hand. Tell me about a time when your communication skills enabled you to influence the way team members thought or acted, even in a very difficult situation.

Serval leaders described situations where customers were unhappy with the deliveries that the team had made. One leader said, “a customer was unhappy with our delivery. There was an expectation gap between customer and us as a team/organization. The team member and I reviewed the situation together. I communicated the situation and the understanding of the problem with both the team member and our customer. I made sure both I and he/she understood the problem. Also, that he/she (the team member) knew I had “their back”.

One leader mentioned cultural differences in the business that created difficulties in understanding each other and where “we were coming from”. He/she described it as, “A situation where we had cultural differences in terms of business culture. We had a situation where we were in a meeting with a customer and we as Norwegians were quite upset and afraid of losing the customer after this meeting. The other part of our organization who was sitting in another country was very neutral and said why are we worrying about this, the customer did not seem upset. He/she did not understand the Norwegian business culture and after a few rounds on this I made him understand how we work, act and do things”.

Some of the leaders responded to this with that it is all about turning the negativity to something positive. "It was all about building trust again and turn the teams’ mindset from negative to positive.”. One leader gives an example, “A new employee, that had left a company where we got in as the supplier for that company. The “old” company wanted this resource to be the delivery person into this company from us. He did not want to, he had a reason for leaving this company. I guided him to say, “what about bringing others in as a team, working on this together and you not being the main lead but just an advisory focal point backend for the team?”.

I agreed with him and the customer that this was the best approach and we set up well-functioning governance to support this”. "I mentioned that there were opportunities for others to step up and take on more responsibilities. The result was positive and my positivism towards the task influenced the team to be positive. They took ownership, much more than before, and managed to lift themselves up from the negativity to the positive drive they got”.