Getting Naked with Your Team

Want to foster trust in your team? Then it's time to get naked—kind of. This is a professional post, after all! Author Patrick Lencioni advocates for "getting naked," or being vulnerable with your team in order to create a foundation of trust. Trust is the foundation of any cohesive team. It leads to healthier conflict, which produces better decisions, more accountability, and, ultimately, better results.   There are two types—transactional trust (Lencioni calls it predictive trust), and vulnerability-based trust. Let's break them down.

Transactional trust comes down to two things: I trust that you are competent to do your job, and I trust that you have good intentions to do your job. This is the kind of trust people who have known one another a while, even casually, can have. You can predict what a person will do based on your experience watching them work. 

Vulnerability-based trust is when you can say hard things to your team like “I’m sorry,” “I don’t know,” and “I need help.” But, the very fact that those things are considered hard is because they are, for most adults, deeply ingrained habits developed over a lifetime. So how do you change these behaviors? How do you replace those old habits with new ones? 

Brené Brown has spent her life researching vulnerability and shame, and she’s identified a process to help leaders set the correct tone for vulnerability-based trust on their teams (and in the whole organization). The acronym is BRAVING: 

• Boundaries: Make sure everyone is clear with each other about what you will or won’t do, tolerate, etc. 
• Reliability: Simply put, you’ll do what you say you will do. 
• Accountability: You are the first to acknowledge your own mistakes and make things right.
• Vault: People can count on you to keep confidential things confidential.
• Integrity: You will do the right thing, even when (especially when) it’s the hard thing. 
• Non-judgment: When I acknowledge my mistakes, my concerns, or my feelings, you won’t judge me for them.
• Generosity: Assuming good intentions and basing your relationships, decisions, and actions based on those good intentions. 

Trust and vulnerability is a chicken-and-egg kind of thing. You’ve got to have trust in order to get vulnerable, and being vulnerable is the key to building trust. Someone has to be courageous enough to go first, and that person should be the most senior person on the team. You must lead the way—it’s right there in your title. 

For leaders who can see the logic in this but can’t see their way past how risky it feels to get vulnerable, there’s a lot of ‘inside work’ that a coach can help you think through. Your coach can help you assess your readiness to be vulnerable and take active steps in the right direction before you go to your team and ask them to join you in your vulnerability.