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Apr 07 2010

Building Social Networks of Trust and the Challenges of Dysfunctional Teamwork

Category: career,community building,connections,executive learnings,social media,teaming & leadership,tech opinion,trust & reputation — jmacofearth @ 8:32 am

[This post is a response to Steve Woodruff's post: Out of the Bud, into the Flower]

Steve, you nailed it here "how we can transform people and society and business using new tools and approaches."

And assembling the like-minded folks to build the co-operative network of the git-r-dun future is all about social, all about business, and mostly about TRUST. Chris Brogan may have put the term squarely in the social media consciousness, but Pat Lincioni in his massive work The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team really nailed the problem/opportunity of working in teams.

The core foundation of a team, any team (virtual or localized), is Trust. Without Trust we cannot argue effectively. Without Trust we don't venture new ideas that might be shot down. Without Trust we might not get PAID.

In the year since I left Dell to charge after all things social I continue to believe we need a "wuffie" scale, or some way of calculating someone's Trust Karma. LinkedIn profiles and endorsements are good, and a person's social media participation is better, but the BEST indicator of someone's TEAM VALUE is a personal connection to someone who has worked with that person before.

As we go more and more global and more virtual with teams we will never assemble in the same room, EVER, we have to work harder to become trustworthy. We have to deliver on our promises. Launch when we say we are going to launch. Show up for meetings on-time and prepared.

When someone who has worked with you for 15 years recommends you for a new position at a company, or as part of a team, that is the highest endorsement you can get. Over the course of your relationship with this person, they have seen you challenged, most likely they have seen you fail, and more than anything they have seen you earn your Trust stripes.

And when you have that connection, when you have that Trust with someone, the endorsements and opportunities to work with them and with people in their networks is exponential.

So what can we do to build a better network of Trust Agents? What's the platform for Trust? I'm working to find out, and hoping that all of us are successful at creating our own path to Trust and Success.

Thanks for the spark.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/trust-nets

Smartest Guy in the Room and Teamwork

Category: executive learnings,social media,teaming & leadership,trust & reputation — jmacofearth @ 9:12 am

Scott Berkun has some amazing posts about managing Rockstars, leading the "smartest guys" and basically working with awesome teammates without pissing them off.

And sometimes the TEAM comes before the Rockstar.

Here's Scott's Teams and Stars essay on the subject and a short excerpt.

It’s hard to understand good teams until you’ve been on both good and bad ones. You can often find frustrated people on good teams and happy people on bad teams: they don’t have enough perspective to see where they are for what it is. Some stars, people of high talent, are poor judges of teams because they’re tempted by the desire to stand out rather than the desire to succeed. Despite this, a common managerial temptation is to hire big talents, challenging the balance of needs for a successful team.

I once was part of the Best Team in the World. And since then I know that at least two of my previous teammates and I have struggled to regain some perspective on our TEAM work.

Once you have been part of an Agile team it is hard, maybe impossible, to go back to a dysfunctional team. In the Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team the core foundation for TEAMing is TRUST. I assert that this issue is the same in social media, or collaborative communities online, where we must find tools and take risks to establish the trust between ourselves and our potential teammates. When the TRUST is threatened the entire TEAM is threatened.

Here is a graphic of Lencioni's hierarchy.