Does team building really build trust?

I’ve written previously on the topics of both team building and team bonding. They are – in my mind – two different things, each with its own focus. Unfortunately, coaches often conflate them, probably to their detriment.

I’m not the only person to think this way.

The team building topic came up in an episode of the EconTalk podcast. The guest for this particular show was Colin Fisher. Fisher is a scholar of organizational behavior and author of The Collective Edge. The talk focused on how teams succeed, which is what got my attention.

Although it’s not specifically about sports, I think the discussion is generally worth a listen. Here, however, I want to focus on a particular point. Starting from about minute 37, Fisher talks about developing trust between team members. He comes from the perspective of what many think of as team building, but I call team bonding.

Here’s an excerpt from the transcript:

So many people think I’m going to be this big fan of team building exercises… And when I say it’s based on a flawed premise, this comes back to the idea that before we can work together, we’ve got to have trust first. That if I don’t trust you, we can’t work together. And so the first step is going to be sometime where we get to know each other so then we can start to trust one another.

But this turns out not to be very true. And there’s a couple of reasons for that.

One is that when we say the word trust, we’re conflating a couple of different things. That there’s a kind of what psychologists would call relational trust … So, so a lot of times we have this with our family and our friends. Now, a lot of team building exercises are geared at building that kind of socioemotional trust where we’re comfortable telling each other things about our lives, our families, our Interests, and so forth.

But there’s another kind of trust, which we would call instrumental trust or task-based trust. And that means when I ask you to do a task, you are going to do it to the standard that would satisfy me. And that it turns out that that task-based trust tends to be what’s more important when we are working in an organization.

Here’s the clincher:

And these two kinds of trusts are not as correlated with one another as you might think.

If you’ve been coaching as long as I have, you’ve probably seen examples of this. Think teams that get along great off-court, but struggle to click right when playing. They don’t have the task-based trust. Or flip that around. There are many examples of high performing teams who don’t connect off-court. They have the tasked-based trust, but not as much the socioemotional.

Fisher then goes on to talk more about this task-based trust and how we develop it (bolding is mine):

… the best way to get task-based trust is to do tasks together, right? That like when you, when we start working together, I’m going to see, do you deliver things the way I want … And am I going to do the same for you? ...so rather than having team building exercises that are decoupled from the tasks… we’re much better off if we just do the task.

And here’s where team psychology and the environment we create comes in (again, my bolding):

…when you’re not doing what I need you to do, I have to be able to say that to you and vice versa. And that because our primitive brains are so afraid of ostracism, we’re very hesitant to do that. We don’t like to feel like, “Oh, this other person’s not going to like me. And so I’m not going to give them feedback. I’m not going to tell them what I need.” So we do have to overcome that.

…I would reverse the way I think a lot of people who use team building exercises think of this logically and say, let’s first work together. And then through that work together, let’s figure out how we can tell each other the stuff we need to tell each other to get this work done. … we feel like we can ask questions, we can make mistakes, we can push each other and give each other difficult feedback without the fear of ostracism. And that kind of trust is really important for getting work done.

Definitely worth a listen.

And no, EconTalk isn’t a show all about economics. It actually covers a wide variety of topics. Yes, there’s often an economic link, but it’s usually not the main focus. I’ve been a listener for 10+ years now, but I pick and choose based on the subject matter.