Mastering the Art of Remote Team Building: Unlocking Trust and Success

Assembling a top-performing team is a monumental task for any manager, but when your team is spread across different time zones and continents, the challenge becomes even more complex. With remote work becoming the norm for countless professionals, it's crucial to crack the code for building trust and collaboration in a virtual setting.

The silver lining? When trust is already established among team members, remote work is a breeze. The real challenge lies in cultivating trust from day one in a remote environment.

Tuckman's "Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing" model may not always prove helpful in practice, but it does emphasize one crucial point: teams that don't trust each other may never progress beyond the storming phase.

Trust is the backbone of successful teamwork for several reasons:

1. Conflict is inevitable and even essential in problem-solving. Embracing conflict is a powerful force that drives innovation. Teams who trust each other resolve conflict with minimal drama and take ownership of decisions.

2. Without trust, differing ideas can be perceived as malicious, hindering progress. In many cases, teams will purposely avoid conflict, resulting in more trust issues. Avoiding conflict can lead to decisions that the team will not own collectively. This is a really bad situation when the eventual hiccups occur in implementing ideas.

3. Teams with trust issues may rely on escalating decisions to managers. Managerial intervention in decision-making can exacerbate trust issues, impacting the team's effectiveness. Managers are farther away from the problem, and studies show that the quality of their decisions is lower than that of the collective team. Also, managers stepping in to decide is disempowering to the team.

In the age of remote work, building trust has become more challenging. Research from the University of Texas, University of Illinois, and Harvard shows that remote teams face greater obstacles in fostering trust.

Casual office interactions, which often pave the way for trust-building, are missing in remote settings. Leaders and managers must now take intentional actions to cultivate trust among their remote teams.

Try these trust-building techniques to supercharge your remote team:

1. Make communication your top priority. Transparency and clarity are vital in a remote setting. If everyone is working with the same information, it reduces the likelihood of distrust occurring due to different team members having incomplete information.

2. Use mastermind development opportunities as a method of learning more about each other. An example of this is taking a leadership development mastermind class as a team. This allows the team to discuss important topics outside of their "transactional work."

3. Bring your team together in-person periodically, if feasible, to create lasting connections.

One successful approach to building trust involves team members sharing personal experiences and backgrounds. Patrick Lencioni's The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team offers a powerful method for this. In a safe environment, team members can discuss their Myers-Briggs results or Clifton Strengths assessments, as well as share details about their upbringing and childhood interests. This exercise helps everyone recognize that each person is wired differently and has unique experiences.

Understanding and embracing these differences prevents team members from perceiving others' motivations as malicious. Celebrating diversity, rather than fearing it, is the key to unlocking the full potential of your remote team