Being a fan of Edgar Schein and using his research on Organization Development, psychological safety, and coaching.
Schein shares something that sounds obvious and is often not placed into team goals or project plans.
Team members develop trust and learn how to work as a team when they are faced with challenges that none of them have solved before. They need to use and learn from each other how to navigate the challenge.
This can quickly pull a team together and develop trust. You can see this explored in how to create-learning-teams.
This is what a good team-building and experiential learning design can do. Support the learning and how the team, who had no prior experience, worked through a challenge where no one was the subject matter expert. As the people learn together, they develop psychological anchors that they can return to when times get tough. This anchor is a reference point for how the team works, knows and grows.
What to do as a manager or team leader?
- Purposely assign tasks that no one person on the team knows how to accomplish
- Support an environment that has a high level of support and pressure from the team ( community )
- As the team works through #1, ask them, “How, as a team, did you go about your work? Please walk me through your steps. What obstacles did you encounter? How did you work through them? How can I support you further?”