I have just left a meeting room, after 3 days of the annual strategic planning session, at one of my customers. My #1 insight is that the most valuable skill a leadership team needs in order to perform is TRUST and here is why : 

1. Trust between the leadership team members, will allow them to feel safe with each other and will allow them to be vulnerable in the room and then, bring themselves into the discussions, reduce boundaries and protections and deal with the real thing openly and face the challenges the company meets Brené Brown wisely said – “Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change”
2. Trust will enable team members to give each other candor feedback and by doing that help each other to become much better in what they do. It will take the discussions from peek to peek and allow the team members to bring their best to the room 
3. Trust between team members will enable them to take risks, dare and challenge the status quo. As Esther Perel said, “Trust is a confident engagement with the unknown” and the unknown is one of the most predictive things in a startup.
4. Lastly, trust is a key to making teamwork as one unit and not as a group of individuals. Trust will enable the leaders to become executives and care about the company and not only about their own teams.

Six months ago, I came into a room where only the CEO speaks, most of the important items were discussed offline 1-1. No one presented data, meetings were all about “how great did it do and how amazing is my team” and feedback was a way to insult each other. Guess what, the company missed her Q3 targets, everybody knew what needs to be done but no one spoke about it openly in the room. 

So, CEO/Founder, entrepreneur, team lead. Give me a call and let’s start working on building trust within your team, and let me help you supercharge your teamwork