When Trust Takes Away from Effective Collaboration

Trust, often seen as the bedrock of successful collaboration, can paradoxically hinder its effectiveness. Explore how over-reliance on trust can stifle innovation, limit diversity of thought, and ultimately, impede collaborative success.

Leaders should be aware of a counterintuitive risk of trust

A strong emphasis on trust can lead to inertia as employees might prioritize appearing trustworthy over behavior necessary for good, collaborative decision making.

• Shift attention away from creating trust toward information sharing, perspective taking, and effective turn taking to make progress.

How our focus on trust drives inertia and poor decision making

It’s much harder for people to work together on high-impact, complex transformation challenges if they’re more concerned with appearing trustworthy than with effective exchange of information and ideas

• New individuals hold back information, challenging questions, and out-of-the-box ideas in order to establish themselves as competent, benevolent, and trustworthy
• Individuals representing the old norm who are not experts in the area of transformation hold back questions and hide ignorance and knowledge gaps
• The more an organization emphasizes the importance of trust, the more the behaviors above amplify

How to keep trust from getting in the way

To maximize productive behavior and strategic progress when gathering diverse groups to solve important, complex challenges, leaders are wise to communicate that: Trust is important to many aspects of organizational success, but interpersonal trust is not a prerequisite for collaboration.

• Everyone involved is responsible for creating an atmosphere where others can act with both candor and vulnerability when sharing their perspective.

Building trust vs. proving trustworthiness

A strong emphasis on trust can lead to inertia as employees might prioritize appearing trustworthy over behavior necessary for good, collaborative decision making

• Over emphasizing trust can hinder collaborative decision-making and cause inertia, and it is important to strike the right balance between trust and progress

How trust and distrust interfere with decision making

In a fast-changing environment, you need access to accurate and updated data in order to make good decisions.

• Being able to include new individuals and their information into teams and decision-making processes is the second requirement for collaborative decision making.

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