The People Part of Enterprise Collaboration and Virtual Teams Trust = Critical Ingredient … Trust is the critical ingredient to the performance of virtual teams is trust, and it’s hard for 4 reasons: lack of face time, networked individualism, high

In The Secret Sauce for Virtual Teams, Anne Truitt Zelenka provides a stimulating discussion about how to make geographically dispersed teams function through the use of trust.

Let me offer some more general context for What Trust Is, and How It Gets Created.

As to What Trust Is, my co-authors and I (in The Trusted Advisor) refined an earlier concept called the Trust Equation. It’s really formula for trustworthiness. It is a function of:
C = credibility–mostly, what I say
+
R = reliability–mostly, what I do
+
I = intimacy–how safe someone feels talking to me,
and all that divided by
S = Self-orientation–how focused I am on myself, vs. you.

The first two factors–credibility and reliability–are what we usually associate with trust. But as you point out with small interactions, the intimacy factor is very important.
And the most important of all is the S factor–to whom are you paying attention. We trust those who have our interests at heart–we distrust those who are self-obsessed in all things.

How is Trust Created? In a sequential interaction. Formally, it’s Engage, Listen, Frame, Envision, Commit. More simply, it means you Listen before you Advise or Act.

In other words, we trust those people who earn the right to be trusted; and they earn it by listening to us. Only after people have walked in our shoes, so to speak, do we deign to listen to their opinion. The old line is trite, but true–people don’t care what you know until they know that you care.
And caring is all about that S factor.

So–any secret sauce for virtual teams (or any other relationship) is going to be heavy on relationships vs. transactions, heavy on listening, light on competitiveness, heavy on paying attention to others and helping them.

Here is my take on Steve Rubel’s recent weblog post “The Web Changes How We Define Friendship”, where I am mentioning that it is not all about quantity or quality of friendships, but more than anything else about the effort you put into it through b…