Trust is often one of the first things that comes up when we work with teams. Sometimes it’s about relationships that have become strained, conversations that haven’t happened, or frustrations that have built up over time. Other times, it’s simply a sense that the team isn’t working together as well as it could.
There is often important relational work to do. But we have learned to ask another question alongside it: Before we work on trust, have we checked clarity?
Sometimes what is experienced as a trust challenge is amplified by something else. People may not be sufficiently clear about why they are working together, what they are collectively responsible for, where roles begin and end, how decisions are made, or what they can expect from one another.
The interplay of Team Effectiveness
Our Ikigai Leading Team Effectiveness Model has been at the heart of our work for years.
We’ve previously explored the foundations of Clarity, Trust and Impact, and what it takes to co-create them in practice. What we’re noticing more deeply in our work is what happens between them: how each shapes and strengthens the others.
At its simplest Clarity helps us understand why we are here and what we are here to achieve. Trust shapes how we work together to achieve it. Impact asks what becomes possible collectively, for whom, and how we know.
Before a team can meaningfully explore how we will work together, it needs enough shared clarity about why we are here together and what we are here to achieve together.
Clarity is more than knowing your role
Clarity begins with shared purpose and outcomes. Why does this team exist? What are we collectively responsible for? What matters most right now?
It extends into roles and responsibilities, decision rights, boundaries and interdependencies, and what team members can reasonably expect from one another.
Without enough clarity unclear boundaries can be experienced as territorial. Unclear decision rights can feel like exclusion or interference. Different interpretations of priorities can appear to be a lack of commitment. Unspoken expectations can lead us to make assumptions about another person’s intent or capability.
When clarity is low, we often fill the gaps with assumptions. And assumptions about roles, intentions and priorities can quickly become stories about people.
This doesn’t mean every trust issue is a clarity issue. Genuine breaches of trust, relational histories and patterns of behaviour need to be addressed directly. We remain responsible for how we show up, the conversations we avoid and our impact on others.
But before concluding the problem sits entirely in the relationship, it is worth asking whether ambiguity around the work is also contributing.
Enough clarity to navigate uncertainty
Clarity does not mean certainty.
In complex environments, priorities shift, stakeholder needs compete, roles evolve, new information changes what we thought we knew. The work is not to eliminate ambiguity but to create enough shared clarity to navigate uncertainty together.
What do we know? What don’t we yet know? What is within our parameters to decide? What is still emerging?
Clarity isn’t something a team establishes once, it is continually co-created.
Clarity creates ground for trust. Trust helps us go deeper.
Clarity creates some of the conditions in which deeper trust becomes possible, while trust enables teams to surface ambiguity, challenge assumptions and co-create greater clarity.
Yet clarity alone does not create trust.
Trust grows through what happens between us: whether we follow through on commitments, welcome challenge, acknowledge our impact, repair when things go wrong and stay in conversation when perspectives differ.
As trust deepens, we become more able to say, I don’t think this is as clear as we think it is. We can name competing priorities, surface a boundary that isn’t working, admit we don’t know, or challenge apparent agreement.
We’ve seen how much can shift when teams stop looking at trust as something to fix in isolation and begin exploring more broadly what might be contributing to the tensions they’re experiencing.
A few questions to sit with...
- Where might tensions or frustrations in your team be pointing to a need for greater clarity?
- What assumptions about roles, decisions or expectations might be getting in the way of working well together?
- How comfortable is your team with surfacing uncertainty, challenging assumptions or acknowledging when things aren’t clear?
Images by Yannis Papanastasopoulos, Ian Talmacs and Maz Bohme on Unsplash
