Building Team Trust (The Shameless Honesty Game)
Introduction to the Team Trust Game
This is a simple ‘game’ to play – you can do it in a ‘physically present’ environment, or ‘virtual setting’. Our game helps to build team trust and to create a culture around ‘shameless honesty’, which in turn can give people the courage to really articulate key issues within an organisation.
To Start
First of all, create 4 banners – STRONGLY AGREE, AGREE, DISAGREE, STRONGLY DISAGREE.
And next...
Start off by asking a series of questions and get your teams to signal or write where they ‘are’ in terms of the four corners. We have found at the School of Babel that the more a team practices this ‘game’, the better quality of discussion takes place because trust is increasingly present. If you are in a room together, ask your team to walk to the corner that most accurately reflects their response to your question. The first few questions should be ‘normalisers’. Such statements you could start with include: ‘I love coffee’ or ‘I love cats’.
When you find the team are comfortable expressing opinions, you can begin to ask more challenging questions such as I:
- ‘Agree with our strategy of ….’
- ‘Understand our goals and objectives….’
- ‘Feel fully utilised within this team…’
After each question, and once your team have expressed their views, ask some of them to explain their choice for where they are ‘standing’ (which corner they are in).
Sharing views and expressing true feelings about strategic direction, goals, or even giving direct feedback to each other, will help to harness your team’s true potential and build team trust.
Location of your team
How you set up of the exercise will be different depending on whether you are a physically present team or a virtual team.
For physically present teams, you can put the banners in each corner of your meeting room. In a virtual team, you can ask your team to have 4 pieces of paper they hold up as you ask a series of questions. Alternatively, if the web meeting platform has ‘emojis’, you can agree which faces are used for each of the banners/positions.
And finally continue to build towards creating shameless honesty and team trust
You might find it useful to use this exercise as a quick ice-breaker at each team meeting.
As the team become more comfortable with being ‘shamelessly honest’, so the dynamics and dialogue within your team meetings will improve and the stronger bonds of team trust will be!