Trust Falls Don't Build Teams: QMN049

Martial Mental Models: The Quartermaster, Tuesday, 2 July

(Today’s report is a 4 minute read)

BLUF: Modern corporate team building exercises miss their purported mark of creating cohesive teams with mutual trust. Low-risk, one-size-fits-all games acceptable for office environments don't produce the desired results. Military training, conversely, builds trust with intense shared experiences with high stakes and singular goals. They provide a foundation for mutual trust, and therefore psychological safety. 

KSA here. I’ve worked all kinds of jobs over the last 25 years – mostly owing to my brash and restless temperament – and I have been exposed to and participated in an array of ineffective institutional exercises centered around team-building. I have never observed a single corporate team-building activity, whether involving trust falls, corporate award ceremonies, or Jeopardy-style quizzes about company history that succeeded in uniting anyone in anything except abject scorn for the creators and organizers of these events. I do, however, recall nights of near-total alcoholic oblivion, fistfights, and prolonged periods of high stress and uncertainty that did what no weekend retreat could ever do: bond people. In a bourbon-fueled discussion with Chris P., we named this the “blood and booze” theory and developed a few possible reasons why it works so well. What they all boiled down to was that intense shared experiences with high stakes and singular goals provide a foundation for mutual trust, and therefore psychological safety. 

Of the various explorations of team dynamics that I’ve examined, I’ve come to agree most with those observed by Bruce Tuckman in his stages of team development, particularly the original four that he developed in 1965. Tuckman observed that all teams go through a four-part cycle as they coalesce:

1. Forming: the team assembles and members orient themselves to each other. Personal internal dialogues and assessments of one’s teammates take place. Personalities begin to surface. Leaders – whether qualified or not – begin to assert themselves as such.

2. Storming: this is the phase that can make or break a team: the surfacing of open conflict, disagreement, petty bickering, personality clashes, and differences of opinions all threaten to prevent the team from moving forward unless they can find a way to move past all that and towards their common objective. 

3. Norming: after the dust has settled, so have people settled into roles according to their abilities (well, hopefully). This is still a precarious state: it’s easy to slide back into storming due to lingering resentment or unsettled conflict.

4. Performing: teams that are full formed can perform their tasks, compete with other teams, and generally get things done. That said, it’s not an end-state: it’s not static. Should new members arrive or old members leave, the whole process can start all over again. Interpersonal chemistry is volatile: this is why hiring the right people in the first place is so vital. 

In my scant, totally unscientific experience, beer and some physical stress accelerates team-building, forcing participants to get through Tuckman’s storming phase and situating them squarely in the norming and performing stages. Sadly, there are few opportunities to implement this kind of methodology in the average office. 

So, should you take your team out for shots and then get into a fight in the parking lot with employees of a rival agency to build that cohesion you lack? That’s up to you. All I can say is that while doesn’t always work, it definitely works better than trust falls. (KSA)

WORTH NOTING HERE: Stanley McChrystal was interviewed by HBR a few years ago for his thoughts on building teams. Check it out (4 min) for a few good insights on a number of topics we like to cover at The Quartermaster: “You come with a reputation, but the reputation doesn’t necessarily include trust. It includes an assumption of competence. Sometimes it includes negative things. People might be afraid because they hear you’re a hard-ass. Regardless, the number one thing I try to do is develop personal relationships with key people in the organization. I try to exhibit trust in small ways. In a briefing, if somebody asks me for a decision, I might turn to a subordinate and ask them to handle it. I don’t ask for specifics, and I’m very overt — almost theatrical — about it. Everybody else sees it. The message is: “I trust you guys to handle this stuff,” and that can grow virally throughout an organization.” (BJM)

HOPE WE DON’T FIND OUT: What if All Your Slack Chats Were Leaked? (5 min) “Right now, Slack stores everything you do on its platform by default — your username and password, every message you’ve sent, every lunch you’ve planned and every confidential decision you’ve made. That data is not end-to-end encrypted, which means Slack can read it, law enforcement can request it, and hackers — including the nation-state actors highlighted in Slack’s S-1 — can break in and steal it.” (BJM)

YOUR WORLD IS CHANGING FAST: Congress wants a review of the Corps’ plan to distribute forces across the Indo-Pacific (4 min) “The Corps is seeking to trim its nearly 20,600 Marines stationed on Okinawa in half down to roughly 11,500. The redistribution is part of the Corps’ effort to ameliorate tensions and return land occupied since World War II back to local Okinawans. But the redistribution of Marines across the Indo-Pacific is also strategic. Decentralizing Marines across the region complicates any attack by Chinese forces in the region. Moving the mass concentration of Marines off Okinawa means China can no longer concentrate ballistic missile attacks in one region. According to the DPRI brief, the Corps wants to relocate about 1,300 Marines to Australia, 4,100 to Guam and about 2,700 Marines to Hawaii.” (BJM)

Remarks Complete. Nothing Follows.

KS Anthony (KSA) & Brady Moore (BJM)