Team Processes: Trust Building

1. Conduct a Shopping Mall Test of your team members.

The shopping mall test is quite simple. Imagine you are walking through a shopping mall. You look ahead and see a member from your team before he sees you. Do you quickly divert into a store to avoid talking to them or do you go up to them and say hi and visit briefly before moving on. The latter is evidence of strong trust and team relationship. However, since you will not see your team member in a physical setting, your shopping mall is a virtual communication mall. As you are logged on to virtual communication tools (i.e. text messaging, Skype, i-chat, etc.), others can see that you are also connected. When you see a team member come on to a virtual communication tool do you send off a quick hello to them and visit briefly (or if sent such a greeting do you respond). This is similar to meeting and saying hello in the shopping mall. This allows for team members to visit about non-work related things, much as you would in a shopping mall or an office hallway. It does not need to be a long visit, but a brief interaction to say hi and come to know one another.