Embrace Your Interdependence

One way to improve trust among your team is by fostering a greater interdependence among individual team members.

True interdependency is more than merely knowing who is responsible for which stages of a project or how someone else’s work affects your own. True interdependence happens when team members truly understand how one another think and communicate, and appreciate the unique skills and perspectives each person brings to the team. It’s knowing who to go to solve specific problems that may arise and feeling a deep sense of collective accountability to one another.

Our first game, Balloon, is an excellent tool for building this high level of interdependence. Here’s one real-life example:

During a play session we facilitated with a small nonprofit earlier this fall, the experience of collectively completing a challenge helped team members recognize their own problem solving perspective and appreciate the value of other perspectives. By seeing in real time how others think, they could better understand each other’s role, which reinforced mutual respect and commitment to shared goals. By the end of our play session, they were actively brainstorming about ways to apply these insights in their day-to-day interactions, from changing the structure of certain meetings to bringing new people into existing conversations.