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Leaders are discovering that no matter how talented a team may be, innovative ideas may flounder and productivity may drop if team members lack trust in one another. This lack of trust can be the result of several different factors. Research shows that our own intuition can be wrong when judging those we don’t know well. First impressions are not always the best way to judge a person and can prove to be inaccurate, experts say.
Some employees may have had poor experiences working on cross-functional teams in the past, further eroding their willingness to trust such teams again. Additional obstacles to establishing trust include old-fashioned turf battles, poor communications and an unwillingness to change how work gets done.
A recent study found that nearly 75% of cross-functional teams are dysfunctional.
Thomas Barta, a former McKinsey partner and leadership expert explains that managers must serve as “integrators” for teams, helping members better communicate and understand one another. Barta explains that when employees from different functions get together, it can lead to some strong differences of opinion and leaders need to help workers get past those defensive positions and instead learn about one another. “Trust and intimacy come about by building a relationship with someone – finding out who they are and what they’re about,” he says.
Barta says one way for leaders to make a real difference in the level of trust in cross-functional teams is to create a joint vision with the team members of what needs to get done.
Once cross-functional teams come together and begin working on ideas, “You’ve got to listen to what team members think, even if it’s pushback,” Barta says. “That’s when you walk through what concerns them and those issues will become less and less.” He stresses that one of the most effective ways to bring team members together is to tell a story – and tell it again and again.
Listening to an entire team – and then spending even more time listening to individuals – is key if leaders are to help trust develop. Among other suggestions from experts:
- Keep teams updated.
- Ask for communication preferences.
- Avoid too many cooks.
- Don’t ignore troublemakers.
- Don’t be afraid to pull rank.
- Make it a priority.
A Human Capital Institute study finds that employees are more likely to trust someone based on the consistency, predictability and quality of the person’s work and actions, rather than trusting the person simply because he or she holds a certain role in the organization.
“This underscores the fact that at its core, trust must be earned through individual exchanges and behaviors—it does not come with a job title or seniority in an organization,” the report says. The study also finds that greater trust also leads to better bottom-line results – and it’s critical that leaders make it a priority.
There’s compelling evidence that bureaucracy creates a significant drag on productivity and organizational resilience and innovation. By our reckoning, the cost of excess bureaucracy in the U.S. economy amounts to more than $3 trillion in lost economic output, or about 17% of GDP.
According to our analysis of occupational data provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 23.8 million managers, first-line supervisors, and administrators in the American workforce in 2014. How many of these 23.8 million overseers do we actually need? We can get an answer by looking at the management practices of a small but growing number of post-bureaucratic pioneers. Their experience suggests it’s possible to run complex businesses with less than half the managerial load typically found in large companies.
The experience of leading organizations suggests it should be possible to double the ratio of employees to managers and administrators, from 4.7:1 to 10:1. Doing so would free up 12.5 million individuals for other work that is more creative and productive.
There would be indirect savings as well. A myriad of studies have documented the time lost to low-value management processes, from budgeting to the performance review. On the basis of this evidence, it’s reasonable to assume that as much as 50% of all internal compliance activity is of questionable value. If we assume that the 111 million Americans workers who are not managers, supervisors, and administrators (or unincorporated self-employed) are spending roughly 16% of their time on internal compliance (an estimate from a Deloitte Economics study) and that half of that time is wasted, this translates into an annual waste of about 8.9 million worker years.
The goal, of course, isn’t to put 21.4 million people out of work, but to redeploy them into value-creating activities. If these individuals were contributing an average of $141,000 each to economic output each year, rather than adding nothing, U.S. GDP could grow by $3 trillion — and the actual figure would likely be higher.
Three trillion dollars represents 17% of U.S. GDP. If this burden was reduced by half over the next 10 years, productivity growth would increase by a compounded rate of 1.3% annually, essentially doubling the post-2007 productivity growth rate.
Many of the world’s largest economies are in a prolonged productivity slump. In Europe and the U.S., stagnating incomes and diminished economic hopes are feeding a growing appetite for protectionism and spawning divisive, us-versus-them political forces. While some hold out hope that robots, genomics, and the internet of things will one day yield a productivity bonanza, we believe a concerted effort to reverse the rising tide of bureaucracy offers a more immediate and less speculative route to enhanced economic performance.
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Who do you think has the most intimate knowledge of your brand culture and business? Your employees are without a doubt one of the most untapped, organic sources of promotion and content within your organization.
Finding your hidden brand advocates.
One important aspect about sharing your culture and brand from the inside out, is to make sure that you are involving staff from various departments, and not just sales or marketing. Then what you produce will be an authentic, non-fabricated expression of who you are as a business and why your products or services are outstanding.
Campaign strategies and ideas.
Giving consumers a glimpse behind the scenes can include:
- Video tour of a production facility
- Meet and greet introduction to staff, from executive leadership to shipping and receiving
- Meeting the talent or creative team behind favorite commercials, products or services
- Celebrating long-term employees who achieve benchmark anniversaries with the company
- Holiday or fun corporate events that punctuate your brand’s mission and how that carries through to cultivating an enriched social and team environment
Make it fun! Create an incentive, contest or reward for staff who contribute to any advocacy campaign. It will help keep them excited about their involvement and inspire them to share more often.
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To get up to speed on artificial intelligence, Microsoft cofounder and philanthropist Bill Gates recommends Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence and Pedro Domingos’s The Master Algorithm.
“Certainly it’s the most exciting thing going on,” he said of artificial intelligence. “It’s the holy grail, it’s the big dream that anybody who’s ever been in computer science has been thinking about.”
Domingos’s book, released last year by Basic Books, is an introduction to machine learning—”the scientific method on steroids”—and how it relates to everyday life. What we’re really searching for with all this AI tech, argues Domingos, is an ultimate “master” algorithm. He writes: “If it exists, the Master Algorithm can derive all knowledge in the world—past, present, and future—from data. Inventing it would be one of the greatest advances in the history of science.”
Bostrom’s book has been much buzzed about since its 2014 release by Oxford University Press. After reading Superintelligence, Elon Musk tweeted that he echoed Bostrom’s concerns over a world in which machine brains surpassed human intelligence. The following year the tech giant wrote an open letter expressing this concern to AI researchers, signed by Bostrom, Stephen Hawking, and dozens of others. Though Gates has not signed the letter, he has publicly agreed with Musk that super-intelligent machines are a cause for concern.
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