Carmine Gallo

Another thing that gets in the way of forging good connections in any context is a lack of trust.

When we are trying to deal openly with someone, we worry that we may be revealing too much of ourselves. There’s concern that we might be ‘giving something away’.

Trust is at the heart of all good ensemble work. When actors act out the emotions of their character, they may also reveal deep aspects of their own character. Their part may require them to ‘strip off’ – emotionally or even physically. They may have to make themselves seem ugly, mean, vindictive or violent. You can’t throw yourself into that unless you have a high level of emotional trust with your fellow actors.

When dancers leap or fall, they must trust that their partners will catch them. It’s when they hesitate or flinch that accidents happen.

When musicians introduce some new variation or theme, they trust that their fellow musicians will follow them and not leave them high and dry.

This level of trust is surprisingly easy to create within the context of the ensemble. It isn’t necessary to trust every aspect of your fellow performers’ behaviour in every possible social context. You don’t have to trust them with your life savings. You just need to know that, within the ensemble, you are allowed to try things and fail. You are allowed to express your emotions and not be laughed at. You are allowed to leap, and they absolutely will catch you.

Early in Dave Packard’s career – before he went on to start Hewlett-Packard with Bob Hewlett in Packard’s garage in Palo Alto, California, in 1939 – Packard worked as an electrical engineer for General Electric. In his book, The HP Way, Packard recalls GE’s strict policy about plant security:

GE was especially zealous about guarding its tool and parts bins to make sure employees didn’t steal anything. Faced with this obvious display of distrust, many employees set out to prove it justified, walking off with tools or parts whenever they could. Eventually, GE tools and parts were scattered all around town, including the attic of the house in which a number of us were living. […] The irony in all of this was that many of the tools and parts were being used by their GE ‘owners’ to work on either job-related projects or skill-enhancing hobbies – activities that would likely improve their

performance on the job.

When HP got under way, the GE memories were still strong and I determined that our parts bins and storerooms should always be open. Sometimes not everyone gets the word, however, which accounts for an incident that occurred some years later. Coming into the plant one weekend to do some work, Bill Hewlett stopped off at the company storeroom to pick up a microscope. Finding the equipment cage locked, he broke open the latch and left a note

insisting that the room not be locked again.

Keeping storerooms and part bins open was advantageous to HP in two important ways. From a practical standpoint, the easy access to parts and tools helped product designers and others who wanted to work out new ideas at home or on weekends. A second reason, less tangible but important, is that the open bins and storerooms were a symbol of trust, a trust that is central to the HP way of

doing business.²³

Dave Packard, The HP Way: How Bob Hewlett and I Built Our Company

Here are some interesting questions about connection and trust.

In the context of your own work environment…

In general, do you trust your colleagues?

Do you and your colleagues often spark ideas off each other?

When you work as a group, does everyone see themselves as equal

before the task?

Do you feel you and your colleagues are ‘there for each other’?

Do you trust your colleagues to deliver what you need for you to be

able to do your job?

Do you back each other up?

Do your colleagues trust you?

Do you trust your immediate boss?

Do you trust your senior management?

As a team, do you think you are more than the sum of your parts?

Do you do things together as a team outside the work environment?

The working environment tends not to be full of trust. It takes a lot of sustained work by senior leaders to build a truly trusting environment.

Building trust by creating genuine ensembles at every level of the organization – from the grass roots to the boardroom – would solve the problem.

To build good connections, we also need to ‘do stuff’ together that is different from what we do in our normal work interaction. We need to break away from the little status games that we all play and begin to accept each other for who we are.

Interestingly enough, a great way to build ensembles is to play music together, dance with each other or put on a show together – because all of these things absolutely demand that we form some kind of a connection; that we create a genuine ensemble.

But it doesn’t really matter what the group does together. What matters is that the stuff we do brings us together and creates trust. When we have trust, we can open up; we can start to become an ensemble.

There are many simple exercises used to ‘warm up’ actors in theatre and to help build ensembles. Simple as they are, they help to build trust and connection. We use these and other simple, ensemble-building exercises in our Performance Thinking leadership development sessions.

The exercises work. They break down barriers and bring people together, creating a basic sense of trust and camaraderie. Some word-based games can stimulate people’s creativity and even reveal interesting collective issues. Below are a few tried and tested examples you might like to try with your own ensembles.