What does a strong, powerful, healthy team look like? Well, the most important thing you can do as a leader is to develop trust.
Trust is foundational to every single human relationship that we share. What having trust within your team looks like is this: Every team member decides and chooses to be truthful and vulnerable with all other team members and to remain truthful at all times. Whenever this this doesn't happen, connections will always decay. A lot of healthy team building has to do with relationship building.
The second most important thing to do is to create a "safe place". This would mean that you create a space where team members are free to take risks and are allowed to fail, that's right; you allow them the opportunity to fail. How else are people going to learn? It also means you allow people on your team to disagree with you and voice their opinions and create a place where people feel safe to voice their opinions too.
It is important to have a high level of truth on your team. When you have a team with team members that are comfortable in sharing their opinions and ideas without being shut down or criticized, you have definitely struck gold! The greatest level of creative imagination now happens in this place, as you will see team members bounce crazy ideas off of each other because there is no fear of their ideas being rejected present. Remember, some of the world's best ideas have originally come from someone else's worst ideas. But you will never get these amazing ideas when your team feels like they cannot share their ideas because of fear.
Another important point is to acknowledge team members needs: You need to become aware of needs. Whenever I tell you the truth of how I am feeling as a team member, I am feeling and then express those certain things that I need. This now makes me vulnerable as I have laid everything out on the table. You need to know that it is important for team members to be comfortable with expressing exactly how they are feeling to you. I know a lot of teams that operate in an environment where there only way a team member survives within that team is by telling others what they think they want to hear. Creating a culture such as this will diminish creativity within your team very quickly.
Many leaders have the idea that when they surround themselves with people who look and think just like them, they are building team. This is a lie! The real and true testing of trust will occur when you can listen, respect and think about something you weren't expecting or don't like from a team member. In order to see this level of trust happen on your team, which will bring out the most productivity (because they feel safe to view their opinions), it is important for your team to share precisely what they are feeling.
But, when you create an atmosphere where team members don't trust each other, it can hurt your team. When some team members don't open up while the rest of your team does, what it is showing the rest of the team is that that person does not trust the team. They may even say things like, "I cannot express myself because I know I will get shut down", "My ideas aren't important" or "If I do share my ideas, I know we won't use them anyway". These people need to know that you trust them and they need to feel trusted. They will usually only share ideas when they feel they are in control. It is important to create an atmosphere of openness and a value for everyone's beliefs as well as their ideas if trust is going to be created on your team.
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