5 ways to build hybrid team trust

With some people in the office, some working from home, some working from hubs or other locations, the leadership juggle of a hybrid team is real. 

It’s bringing plenty of new challenges for leaders, and many of them aren’t obvious or visible challenges. 

Take psychological safety and trust. 

🥏 How do you know you have it with your hybrid team? 
🥏 How would you know if it was fractured? 
🥏 What can you do to repair, build or remedy trust and safety in a hybrid team? 

These five tips from this article in Forbes magazine can help: 

1. Relaunch with a kickoff 
2. Level the field for all
3. Over communicate 
4. Understand preferred working styles 
5. Establish new rituals and norms. 

You’ll need to do something - it won’t just happen automatically. 

These tips give some scope, ideas and tactics to make hybrid work for all ... no matter where we all are. 

Build engagement slowly

Starting with a bang in a meeting may seem like the way to get people’s attention - but the reverse can also be true. As we join the next meeting in our diary, we bring with us a hangover from the previous one.

The previous meeting could have been overwhelming with too much information, or frustrating in how decisions weren’t made. It could have been time wasting or unclear or .... highly entertaining, interactive and uplifting!

Every meeting leaves us with a kind of hangover that we need to unload or process. The guide then for facilitating or leading better meetings is to build engagement s-l-o-w-l-y. Slow and steady style.

That means:

> Not putting people on the spot at the start, or ever

> Not making them look foolish, and

> Not making them wrong.

It’s easy to put people off or get them offside in meetings - online or otherwise Ramp or build engagement with participants slowly, steadily ... even if you’re in a hurry to make things happen. There is plenty going on for people. Lead meeting speed safely.

Do you trust yourself?

In this era of swift delivery to market, rapid change and mega transformations, how do we respond in ways that build TRUST in a team, unit, project or enterprise? At the heart of trust is you, me, us.

The question I think of in building trust is “Do you trust yourself?” Do you trust your ideas, your intuition, your actions, your capabilities?

I’ll be speaking at hashtag#ITARC19 in Stockholm in May 2019; it's the 12th year of Sweden’s largest conference for IT architects. This year, the theme of the conference is ’trust’.

Over 2 days, we will look at trust from different angles: a day of conference; then a day of in-depth workshops. My keynote on Day 1 will be ‘Do you trust yourself?’ Then I’ll deliver a workshop on Day 2 on ‘Cognitive Load Coping' - how to handle all of the information that flows to us and around us, how to cope with and counter information overload or that feeling of information overwhelm.

So what are your thoughts: Do you trust yourself?