“Team culture” is the difference between loving your work and hating it. It’s the difference between a healthy environment in which a group thrives and a sickly atmosphere that directly impacts the bottom line. In “Reactive” team cultures there’s avoidance, scapegoating, turf protection, communication breakdowns and other “triggered” behaviors that don’t serve the team or organization. As coaches and trainers, our job is to help organizations develop healthy, synergistic teams that produce skyrocketing results.

When you have low conflict, you often also have little trust. That doesn’t mean there’s no one within the organization who’s trustworthy. It just means no one has had the opportunity to earn or gain trust. With the organization described in Part 1 of this post, things had been so casual and conflict-free that they hadn’t struggled through tough decisions in a way that builds trust among team members. So, that’s part of what we did with leadership and staff: build trust. As a result of that work, their trust level for one another was ultimately much higher, which was much more healthy for the organization.