Trust Isn’t Built at the Away Day. It’s Built Every Day.

When a leadership team has a trust problem, the response is often to bring everybody together.

An away day, a team-building exercise, some work on communication styles, perhaps a psychometric that helps everyone understand their preferences and differences, followed by a good conversation about how they can work better together.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of those things and, done well, they can create conversations that teams badly need to have, but at PasedaLeader we don’t believe you can take a group of people away for a day, talk about trust and expect what happens between them to fundamentally change.

Trust develops through experience, often in moments that seem relatively insignificant at the time; somebody says they will do something and then does it, a leader admits they got something wrong without spending the next ten minutes explaining why it wasn’t really their fault, two people disagree and discover that the relationship can withstand it, difficult information is shared rather than held back, or somebody asks for help and finds that doing so doesn’t change how other people see them.

Over time those experiences create a picture of the people around us, what we can expect from them, how they are likely to behave when things become difficult and how much of ourselves we are prepared to bring into the relationship.

An away day can give a team the space to begin talking about some of this, but what happens when they return to work will always tell us far more.

Pressure tells us a lot

Most of us are relatively easy to work with when things are going well, which is why we are particularly interested in what happens to people when they are under pressure.

The collaborative leader can become controlling, the supportive leader can start rescuing everybody and quietly resent them for needing so much, the confident leader can become defensive, the thoughtful leader can withdraw, and the person who ordinarily gives others plenty of autonomy can suddenly want visibility of absolutely everything.

These shifts aren’t necessarily conscious and they certainly don’t mean that somebody is a bad leader, but they matter because other people experience them and gradually adjust their own behaviour in response.

If I know you as somebody who gives me autonomy until something goes wrong and then takes everything back, I may become less willing to make decisions without checking them with you first. If you tell me you want challenge but become visibly defensive whenever I disagree with you, I may become more selective about what I tell you, and if you are warm and supportive most of the time but become unpredictable when the pressure rises, I may start watching your mood before deciding whether today is a good day to raise something difficult.

Before long, the team is adapting itself around the leader, and sometimes around several different members of the team, with people becoming careful about what they say, who they say it to, when they say it and how they position it.

At PasedaLeader, we spend a lot of time helping leaders understand who they are when they are at their best, what happens when they move away from that version of themselves and, importantly, what is happening internally when that shift occurs, because telling somebody that they need to be more consistent is relatively easy, while understanding why their behaviour changes under pressure gives us something much more useful to work with.

The things we do to protect ourselves can have the opposite effect

There is an interesting contradiction in leadership because some of the behaviours people use to protect their credibility can end up undermining how others experience them.

Pretending to know when you don’t, defending a decision you now realise was wrong, explaining away a mistake, avoiding a conversation because you don’t know how it will land, holding onto work because you aren’t convinced somebody else will do it as well as you, or maintaining the image of the leader who always has everything under control can all make sense to the person doing them.

If somebody has learned that being a good leader means being competent, certain and dependable, then admitting I don’t know or I got that wrong can feel far more exposing than it appears from the outside.

Yet those moments can often have the opposite effect from the one the leader fears, because there is something very different about working with somebody who can acknowledge a mistake without qualification, change their mind without embarrassment or recognise that somebody else was right without experiencing it as a loss of status.

We don’t need the people around us to be perfect.

We need to have some idea of who they really are and what we can expect from them.

A team doesn’t have one relationship

When organisations tell us that a leadership team has a trust problem, there is another assumption worth questioning, because a team isn’t one relationship but a network of them, each with its own history, assumptions and experiences.

The relationship between the CEO and CFO may be completely different from the relationship between the CEO and People Director, while two members of the team may have years of history that everybody else vaguely knows exists but nobody has ever really addressed.

Somebody may dominate discussions because they don’t believe others will deliver, while somebody else may stay quiet because previous attempts to contribute have taught them there is little point. Another may agree publicly and challenge privately, while somebody else has become the unofficial peacemaker who spends more time managing the relationships around the table than contributing their own thinking.

We describe all of this as a team dynamic, which it is, but underneath that dynamic are individual human beings, each bringing their own beliefs, experiences, relationships and protective behaviours into the room.

This is one of the reasons we don’t believe meaningful team coaching can stay at the level of communication preferences and working styles, because understanding that somebody likes detail isn’t the same as understanding why they become controlling when they don’t have it, just as knowing somebody dislikes conflict doesn’t tell us what they believe might happen if they were to have one.

If we want to change what is happening between people, at some point we need to understand what is happening within them.

Trust involves risk

We sometimes talk about trust in organisations almost as though it were an instruction.

We need to trust each other more.

But asking somebody to trust another person is asking them to accept some degree of uncertainty about what will happen next.

If I challenge you in front of the team, admit that I don’t know something, rely on you to deliver something important or allow you to see a part of me that feels less polished, I cannot completely control how you will respond.

That is the risk.

And people make judgements about whether they are prepared to take it based largely on what they have already experienced.

This is also why damaged relationships cannot simply be reset because everybody has agreed to draw a line under the past. If somebody’s experience has taught them to be cautious, one honest conversation may be an important beginning, but it does not erase everything that came before it.

Something different has to happen afterwards.

So what is the away day for?

We are not anti-away day.

Taking people away from the relentless pace of day-to-day work can give them the space to notice things they have stopped noticing, say things they have avoided saying and understand one another beyond the roles they occupy.

A good team coaching session can surface patterns that have become so normal nobody can see them anymore, create conversations that have been circling the edges for months and help people understand the impact they are having on one another.

But the value of that work is in what the team does with it afterwards.

The real test comes in the meeting the following week when the numbers aren’t good and somebody needs to challenge the CEO, when a deadline is missed, when two people disagree strongly, when somebody needs help, or when a mistake has been made and everybody is watching, consciously or otherwise, to see what happens next.

Those are the moments in which a team begins to discover whether the conversation they had away from the office has actually changed anything.

We need to go beneath the team dynamic

At PasedaLeader, when we work with teams we want to understand what is happening between the people in the room, but we also want to understand what each individual is bringing into it, because the behaviour we see rarely exists in isolation.

The person who won’t delegate may not simply need to learn to trust their team more; they may have spent years building their sense of value around being the person everybody can rely upon, which makes handing something over feel far more complicated than a delegation framework would suggest.

The person who won’t challenge may not be disengaged at all, but may have learned that keeping the peace is preferable to risking a relationship, while the person who dominates the room may not be arrogant so much as deeply uncomfortable when they aren’t visibly adding value.

From the outside, we see behaviour.

If we want that behaviour to change in a meaningful and sustainable way, we need to become interested in what sits underneath it.

An away day can create the time and space for those conversations to begin, and it can be enormously valuable in helping a team see itself more clearly, but no exercise, psychometric or beautifully facilitated conversation can substitute for what people subsequently experience of one another when they are back in the reality of the work.

That is where the change has to live.

Change from within. Developing human-centric leaders.