CLEAR TEAMWORK & COMMUNICATION WEBINAR SERIES

LEARNING CHALLENGE GUIDE

Fostering Trust and Leadership

By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Explore leadership and the importance of both formal and informal leaders
• Leverage new ideas to help support both formal and informal leadership
• Cite the importance of trust and increase the awareness of it on your team
• Apply new skills and tools to build trust within your team
• Explore joy at work and apply strategies

Summary of webinar content:

• What is leadership?
• Formal and informal leadership
• Practising adaptive leadership
• What is trust?
• Foundations to build trust
o Have fun
o Establish a foundation of psychological safety
o Practice the 13 behaviours of high trust leaders

Your Learning Challenge Overview

After each webinar, a learning challenge will be provided to each team. Teams are expected to report on
their experience completing these challenges in their usual monthly report. We will also be asking teams
to share their learning and progress at the next webinar.

Questions? Don’t hesitate to reach out to your improvement advisor for help or to ask
[email protected]!

Applied learning activities:

1: Personal Reflection & Team Assessment Questionnaire

2: The Importance of Distributed Leadership on Your Team
3: 13 Behaviours of High Trust Leaders
4: Personal Histories Exercise
5: Joy at Work Exercise
Activity 1: Personal Reflection & Team Assessment Questionnaire
(estimated time is 20-30 minutes)
1. Think about the trust level within your team.
• Is there strong trust between all team members?
• What are actions are being done on the team to build trust? What behaviours are
hurting trust on the team?
• What did you learn at this week’s webinar that you could start personally applying?

2. Individually, take the attached Team Assessment Questionnaire. The assessment uses the ‘Five
Dysfunctions of a Team’ framework by Lencioni that we discussed in the webinar.

3. Reflect on the following questions:

• Are you surprised at all with the results of the assessment?
• What steps need to be put in place to create a high performing and trusting team?
• What role can you play in creating a high performing and trusting team?

1.0 Team Click on the link in the attachment tab to open the file
Assessment Questionnaire.pdf

(estimated time is 15-20 minutes)

1. Come together with your team and discuss the results of your team assessment questionnaire.
• Are there areas where your team is doing well? What is allowing your team to flourish in
these areas?
• Are there areas that have been identified as needing attention? What needs to happen
to create change around these items?

2. Revisit your teamwork agreement

• As a result of this team assessment, does any of the language need to be updated? Do
new ground rules need to be established?

Resources needed for this activity:

• Completed Team Assessment Questionnaire (found above in the personal reflection section)
• Teamwork agreement
•
Activity 2: The Importance of Distributed Leadership on Your Team
(estimated time is 20-30 minutes)

Teams with distributed leadership recognize the strengths on the team and encourages people to
leverage these strengths in different ways, demonstrating informal leadership. As more team members
take on informal leadership roles, productivity and effectiveness is enhanced.

1. “First Follower: Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy” is one of the best (and most entertaining)
depictions of distributed leadership originating from Derek Sivers’s TED talk. He stands that the
formal leader (the guy who starts the dance alone) is essential to catalyze a movement. But it is
informal leaders like the early adopters (the first and second followers) who ultimately influence
and decide whether a new behaviour takes hold. Together with your team, watch the video and
discuss the following questions:

• Think about a time where you worked on a team or witnessed distributed leadership. What
do you think facilitated this distributed leadership amongst formal and informal leaders?
• What is your team currently doing to encourage distributed leadership?
• Are there any steps or actions that can be taken to further encourage informal leadership?
What needs to happen to create opportunities for informal leaders to shine?

2. A shared team direction or vision can help encourage and leverage distributed leadership, as it
provides team members with the confidence to take on informal leadership roles that drive toward
this common purpose1.

• In light of what you have learned about distributed leadership, revisit your teamwork
agreement.
• Are there any revisions you could make to your broad statement at the beginning of the
agreement to strengthen or clarify your common purpose?
• Does any of the language need to be updated within the agreement to help make space for
distributed leadership on the team?

Resources needed for this activity:

• A screen and internet access to watch the Dancing Man video on YouTube
• Teamwork agreement
•

1
Zhang, Z., Waldman, D. A., Wang, Z. 2012. A multilevel investigation of leader–member exchange informal leader emergence
and individual and team performance. Personnel Psychology, 65, 49-78.
Activity 3: 13 Behaviours Of High Trust Leaders
(estimated time is 35 - 45 minutes)

While there are numerous actions and behaviours that affect trust, in our last webinar, we focused on
Stephen Covey’s 13 Behaviours of High Trust Leaders.

What’s most exciting is that these 13 Behaviours of High Trust Leaders can be learned and applied by
any influencer at any level within any organization. In other words, another way to cultivate distributed
leadership! The net result of knowing and applying these 13 behaviours will be a significantly increased
ability to generate trust with your team members to achieve better results.

Using the attached 13 Behaviours of High Trust Leaders Worksheet to guide you:

1. Meet as a team and divide into small groups.

2. Divide the 13 behaviours evenly amongst the small groups.
3. Take turns within your smaller group to explain:
• The behaviour in your own words
• How the behaviour builds trust
• An example of this behaviour from your everyday work life
• The opposite of this behaviours and how such "withdrawals" deplete trust.

4. Come back together as a group and answer the following questions.

• Which behaviours are already demonstrated and done well on your team?
• Which behaviours could be improved upon on your team?
• As a team, what behaviours will you focus on (commit to learning and applying) that will
help build trust in your relationships?

Resources needed for this activity:

• 13 Behaviours of High Trust Leaders Worksheet

Click on the link in the attachment tab to open the file

2.0 The 13
Behaviours Of a High Trust Leader Worksheet.pdf
Activity 4: Personal Histories Exercise
(estimated time is 15 - 20 minutes)

1. Go around the table and have everyone answer or describe the following points about themselves:
• Where did you grow up?
• How many siblings do you have and where do you fall in the birth order?
• Describe a unique or interesting challenge or experience from your childhood.

2. Ask team members to share what they learned about one another that they didn't already
know. One of the important steps in team building is allowing yourself to be vulnerable.

3. Reflect on how this new information can be used to build trust within your team.

Often, team members will reveal interesting personal information that was otherwise not known. This
personal information is a way to promote vulnerability which is important in the building of team trust.
The team needs to continue building trust as you work together as trust is fluid and cannot be built and
maintained at any one point in time.

Resources needed for this activity:

• An open mind

Activity 5: Joy at Work Exercise

(estimated time is 25 - 30 minutes)

Joy in work — or lack thereof — not only impacts individual staff engagement and satisfaction, but also
patient experience, quality of care, patient safety, and organizational performance. The IHI whitepaper,
“Framework for Improving Joy in Work” serves as an excellent guide for health care organizations to
engage in a participative process where leaders (both formal and informal) ask colleagues at all levels of
the organization, “What matters to you?”. Understanding this will enable your team to better
understand the barriers to joy in work, and co-create meaningful strategies to address these issues. We
strongly encourage reading the whitepaper and think about how you can incorporate the strategies
outlined in your own workplace.

1. To get you started in thinking about how to create more joy at work post the following questions on
flip chart paper in the hallway and invite the team to share their thoughts on the following three
questions:

• What makes for a good day for you?

• What makes you proud to work here?
• When we are at our best, what does that look like?

2. Come together and reflect on how you can build on these thoughts. How can you acknowledge
them as a team and put some into practice?
Resources needed for this activity:
• Flip Chart paper and pen
• IHI Framework for Improving Joy in Work

Click on the link in the attachment tab to open the file

3.0 IHI
WhitePaper_FrameworkForImprovingJoyInWork.pdf

Report it!
We would love to hear how your team worked through these activities. Please include them in your
monthly report, or let your Improvement Advisor know which of these activities you completed. We
would also love your feedback in how to improve these activities for next time. We look forward to
discussing and building on this as a collaborative at our next webinar!

Additional Resources

If you are interested in doing some further reading on the topics we covered today, here are a few
articles that we recommend.

High Impact Leadership: Improve Care, Improve Health of Populations, and Reduce Costs
Click on the link in the attachment tab to open the file

4.0 IHI High Impact

Leadership WhitePaper.pdf

The Neuroscience of Trust

https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-neuroscience-of-trust#comment-section

Have You Experienced Fun in the Workplace?

5.0 Have you

experienced fun in the workplace.pdf
Click on the link in the attachment tab to open the file

The Influence of Authentic Leadership Behaviours on Trust and Work Outcomes of Health Care Staff

6.0 The influence of

authentic leadership behaviors on trust and work
Click onoutcomes
the linkofinhealth care staff.pdftab to open the file
the attachment

Stephen Covey’s Speed of Trust Summary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovoB1gguldI