Meet the Person Behind the Role: A Trust Exercise for Teams

A team is not created by putting names on a chart

Roles and responsibilities are essential. They clarify authority, accountability and the expertise people bring. They do not automatically create the trust needed to challenge an assumption, admit uncertainty or ask for help early.

Trust grows through repeated evidence that other people are attentive, reliable and willing to treat us as more than a function. A small amount of human context makes behaviour easier to interpret and repair.

This does not require forced intimacy. The aim is not to make colleagues disclose private stories. It is to widen the picture enough that professional interaction is no longer entirely transactional.

Knowing more about a colleague does not replace role clarity. It makes the role easier to work with under pressure.

No Shop Talk removes the safest professional script

In Getting to Yes And, Bob Kulhan describes an exercise shared with him by Scot Robinson on print pages 110 and 111. During a team lunch, participants spend thirty to sixty minutes talking about anything except work.

The instruction is deliberately simple. People cannot fall back on status updates, deadlines or familiar job language. They need to become curious about something the other person chooses to share.

Kulhan connects this wider view of teammates with trust and the ability to work together when pressure increases. The conversation is not the work, but it can improve the relationship through which the work must happen.

Structure prevents familiar groups from taking over

An unstructured social event does not automatically build new connections. People often speak with colleagues they already know, while remote participants, newcomers or quieter people remain at the edge.

For an applied improv setting, I would shorten the exercise and use rotating pairs or trios. Each person receives equal time, may pass on any prompt and chooses the level of detail they want to offer.

The structure makes curiosity a shared task rather than a competition for the most entertaining story. It also prevents the highest status person from turning the round into another meeting.

Keep the prompts warm and low risk

Useful prompts invite personality without requesting sensitive information. A skill learned outside work, a place that restores energy, a small routine or a subject someone could happily explain for five minutes all create room for choice.

Avoid prompts about family, health, politics, money, identity or personal difficulty. Those subjects may arise voluntarily, but the exercise should never demand them.

A participant should also be able to answer lightly or pass. Psychological safety is not produced by ordering people to be vulnerable. It grows when boundaries are respected and contributions are received without judgement.

Bring one useful discovery back to work

The final round should reconnect the human conversation to collaboration without converting the personal story into data. Each participant can name one condition that helps them contribute well, such as time to think, a direct question or a written summary.

Colleagues may then understand a familiar behaviour differently. A pause may be preparation rather than resistance. A precise question may be care for quality rather than an attempt to block progress.

The exercise succeeds if the next interaction contains slightly more curiosity and slightly fewer assumptions. That is enough. Trust is built through what happens afterwards.