4. Marianne Broadbent is an Australian management expert who believes that trust is essential to building a great team. In her opinion, great teams don’t just happen but instead are the outcome of a conscious and deliberate effort to understand what makes teams work well. As she says, creating effective teams is not

“rocket science.” She then asks, “So why do so many of us have experiences of mediocre, frustrating, or just plain bad team work? The answer lies in the simple failure to do the work to build genuine trust among team members. To build that trust the individuals need to really get to know one another as people.

They need to know what matters to each other, to deal with conflict constructively, agree on commitments and then hold each other accountable for delivering agreed results.”54 Why is trust so important?

Have you ever worked on a team that was lacking in trust? What were the consequences? What can team members and managers do to increase the level of trust within the team?