When a team grows quickly, trust doesn’t always keep up. New people join, the work still gets delivered, and yet something starts to shift. So how do you build trust in a new team without simply waiting for time to do the work?
I recently spoke to a leader about exactly this. His team is performing well, delivering results, and everyone is really good at what they do. Nothing is particularly wrong, but he’s started sensing something happening beneath the surface.
When an ‘us vs them’ dynamic starts to form
The team has recently grown, some new people have joined, and a subtle ‘us vs them’ dynamic is starting to emerge. The kind where the more tenured people bring experience and the newcomers bring fresh perspectives, and they don’t always see eye to eye. Nothing anyone would describe as toxic, but certainly the beginnings of behaviour change. The kind we don’t want to see in our teams.
His take on it? They just don’t know each other well enough. Not in the sense of knowing everyone’s “stuff”, but knowing each other well enough to ask for help, speak frankly without being misunderstood, or get involved without worrying about stepping onto someone’s turf.
He knows these things might improve naturally over time. But he’s a high achiever himself, and he wants his team to deliver the impact he knows they’re capable of. He’s not interested in waiting for small tensions to become bigger problems. He wants to fast-track the trust.
Which sounds a little counterintuitive. After all, we’re always told that trust takes time.
But does it?
Can trust be built faster? What the research says
In a fascinating 1997 study, psychologist Arthur Aron and his colleagues explored whether it was possible to deliberately create a sense of closeness between complete strangers. They paired people who had never met and gave them just 45 minutes to work through a series of increasingly personal questions, designed to encourage mutual openness and understanding.
And it worked. In less than an hour, people who had never met reported surprisingly strong feelings of connection.
What I find particularly interesting is what this means for teams. We can spend years working alongside someone, seeing them almost every day, and still know remarkably little about what really makes them tick. Yet a single conversation, with the right questions and a willingness to be open, can change that.
This is something I intentionally create in my work with teams. I’ve had people tell me after a single conversation that they feel better known than by colleagues they’ve worked alongside for years.
And that’s precisely the point.
Why teams fill the gaps with assumptions
When we ask questions that go beyond the usual surface-level conversations, we get to understand what really drives people, how they see the world, and why they do what they do.
That matters, because without that understanding, we tend to fill in the gaps ourselves.
We make remarkably quick judgements about each other, often without even realising it. Someone challenges, so we decide they’re difficult. Someone stays quiet, so we assume they’re disengaged. Someone takes charge, so we label them controlling.
But what if the person challenging everything is deeply committed to getting things right? What if the quiet person is carefully processing what they’re hearing, and the person taking charge is trying to create certainty in an ambiguous situation?
The behaviour hasn’t changed. But understanding what’s driving it can completely change how we respond to it.
How leaders can build trust in a team faster
When that understanding goes both ways, people have a much better chance of working with each other rather than around each other.
For a leader, that means not leaving it to chance. Create deliberate space for conversations that go beyond the day-to-day work: what drives each person, what they need from others, how they tend to respond under pressure. When new people join, conversations like these help newer and longer-serving team members see each other as individuals rather than as two camps.
Of course, trust also needs to be earned through what people do consistently over time (and different personality types need different things in order to trust). But perhaps we don’t need to wait months or years to begin building the kind of understanding that makes trust possible.
Questions to ask about trust in your team
How well does your team know each other? Is that enough for mutually supportive, trust-based conversations?
How much of what your team believes about each other is based on assumptions nobody has ever thought to question?
What would be different in your team if you found a way to fast-track trust?
If your team is full of capable people, but misunderstandings, assumptions or small tensions are getting in the way of working well together, my Team INsight Programme builds the trust and understanding that change those dynamics before they become entrenched.
You might also find it useful to read about the subtle signs of low trust in a team.