🌿🧭🌳 OD08: Differences in assessing trust ∙ Team performance, capability & capacity ∙ Tweet for Thought ∙ Diagnostic tools
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1. Differences in assessing trust
A recent research published in The International Journal of Conflict Management by Jeanne Brett and Tyree Mitchell shares how trust is assessed differently in different cultures.
This is a new lens that can help leaders understand how trust and trustworthiness is built across cultures, and we find that it expands the Task-based vs. Relationship-based spectrum of trusting that Prof. Erin Meyer built in her Culture Map tool.
The two factors that the new framework for assessing trust brings are:
High trust vs. low trust cultures (trust first or verify first)
Tightness vs. looseness of the culture (the extent to which social behavior is monitored and violations of social norms carry consequences)
Practical ideas
If you are leading an organization, this framework can help you understand how to build trust based on your specific organizational culture and also how to collaborate and negotiate better with your customers and business partners.
If you are leading a strategic initiative, this can help you better understand how different stakeholders could assess trust in the initiative differently, based on competency, openness, respect or similar values with your team.
Team performance, capability & capacity
During a recent live session hosted by the Global Team Coaching Institute with Professors Peter Hawkins and David Clutterbuck, we came across a powerful message and terms definitions of team performance, team capability and team capacity (detailed in the image below).
The message is that leaders need to move beyond focusing on creating high-performing teams.
Based on Bill Sharpe’s Three Horizons thinking, team performance supports mainly Horizon 1 (H1) - business as usual, keeping the lights on. Organizations and leaders need to enable development of team capability and team capacity as well, that support H2 and H3 of the organization, especially in the context of business as usual being exposed to rapid market, technological or social change.
As our focus is on advising strategic initiatives - explorations of the organization for H2 and H3 - this translates for us in becoming better equipped not only to support high performance of the initiative teams, but helping them build capability and capacity as well.
Practical ideas
If you’re leading an organization, ask yourself how much of the teams development efforts go towards performance or capability or capacity. Is the ratio enabling a better future for your organization, as well as hitting short-term performance goals?
If you’re leading a strategic initiative, consider investing in the capability and the capacity of your initiative team. How is the team improving partnerships for the medium to long term? How is the team co-creating more value with and for all the stakeholders? What could help the team work smarter, not harder?
Tweet for Thought
Diagnostic tools
The Organizational Development unit of the National Health Service in UK has put together a list of 50+ tools that can be used when diagnosing teams or organizations.
We discovered this list via Naomi Stanford’s tweet and we think it’s worthwhile to browse through. What we found particularly useful compared to other collections of tools is the “Uses” column that indicates what each tool can be used for.
The OrgDev newsletter is curated by Raluca and Bülent Duagi, the team behind Sense & Change. We work as Organizational Development Advisors, offering elegant guidance for implementing strategic initiatives in client organizations.