“I’m just so sick of filling in these surveys because nothing ever changes. It feels emotionally unfair to keep asking me to answer these questions when I know you’re not going to do anything about it.”
If you’ve been in organisational development for any length of time, this sentiment probably sounds familiar. Despite significant investment in employee engagement surveys, many organisations find themselves asking the same questions year after year, with limited improvement in either engagement scores or business outcomes.
What if we’ve been looking through the wrong lens entirely?
Seven years of studying real teams at work has revealed a surprising insight about trust: It’s tied to the specific work teams do together and grows from doing that work well – and this fundamentally changes how we approach team development.
Trust in teams is both simpler and more complex than we often make it. Simpler because it emerges naturally from good teamwork practices. More complex because it’s highly contextual, specific to the work we do together, and tied to demonstrated performance rather than general personal characteristics.
A while back, we facilitated a strategy workshop for a leadership team at a law firm. We felt confident going in and opened by setting the context with facts and data. We moved through our slides and discussed the urgency for change. Finally, we shifted focus to the team to get ideas and solutions to their problems.
Unfortunately, the workshop fell flat. People were uninspired and disengaged. Senior leaders dominated the conversation, and their ideas lacked creativity. It was not our finest work.
