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The UNRATIONALIST Newsletter       Fall 2004, Volume 3, Page 3       Four >>

A Matter of Trust
By Ken Pool
When Project Innovations was working with the City of Allen Park to help the new Mayor bring his new team together, I was brought into the middle of a three-stage team building program to facilitate a session on communication skills. After all, even the best program will dive bomb if the players aren't talking to each other in a meaningful way. In Allen Park, I helped the team members cultivate trust. People can respect each other (professionally) and form operational alliances, however without true trust, real progress is likely to stall.

Meet Your Neighbor
Building trust means team members must learn to see each other as people first. By "carefully" moving into the personal arena, team members can relate at a very basic level. I'll ask people to find a group member who appears "very much unlike them in some way" and have them jointly identify five things they have in common and five ways they are dramatically different.

I spend a lot of time helping the team dig deeper into what makes each member of the team tick. They share information about what they're passionate about (i.e. What do you do that's really, really fun? What makes you laugh?) or ask them to answer seemingly bizarre questions (i.e. If you wrote a book about yourself, what would the title be?)

Getting In The Groove
When effective teams work together, it is poetic! When I watched the Detroit Piston's playing for the title, I realized that each player could sense the ball coming at them and the player passing the ball trusted that their team member would make every attempt to catch it. A group, a team, an organization, a region cannot effectively work together and get in sync to pursue common goals without trust.

Editor's Note: Ken Pool has created over 100 training sessions/modules and has trained over 9,000 individuals throughout his professional career. Click here to contact Ken.

Case Study: Wexford County

The City of Cadillac, the largest and most central city in Wexford County, owns the wastewater system. The surrounding municipalities have contract rights to use a specific capacity of the system in certain districts. This situation was fine until these surrounding municipalities began to grow and request more sewer capacity outside these districts. Could growth occur without any one member of the region feeling as if expansion was happening at their community's expense?

Through the sponsorship of Mr. John Divosso, Director of Wexford County DPW, the County of Wexford stepped in and hired Charlie Fleetham and Rich Pierson to facilitate an agreement between these communities. After gathering information and history around the situation, Charlie wrote the final report in the form of a fairy tale to remove individual personalities from the situation and help participants rise above the problem. The fairy tale, One Dragon Breeds Many Offspring, described Wexford's situation.

"Once upon a time, in a land without Kings, there lived five Princes, who ruled five Principalities. All the Principalities were blessed with the ability to produce pffft, a relatively common and base mineral, but of the five, only CenterLand possessed the machines and secret magic required to turn pffft into gold. Needless to say, this situation caused some conflict between the Princes."

The fairy tale helped everyone involved see that the conflict wasn't something happening to them but rather something they were creating. In order for it to change, they would have to change.

Once the fairy tale was distributed, the group met to absorb its meaning. Those meetings led to the creation of a regional entity known as the Lakes Area Partnership, whose mission is to develop regional approaches for managing and allocating fire, wastewater, and water services.

Unrational Leadership™ techniques are not tossed aside when Project Innovations leaves. Instead, these unrational tools are integrated into normal operations. For Wexford County, the fairy tale was the beginning of the story. The Lakes Area Partnership continues to rely on Unrational Leadership™ to develop and implement its partnering agreement.