Cohousing-L Mailing List: Building trust in teams (was helping stuck committee)

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

As many of you have experienced, sometimes maybe even often,that the issue
at hand, is not the real problem, its just a place where the untalked about
problem surfaces as behaviors such as distrust, etc.

In your relationship as a community, there are going to be people who have
unmet needs or issues which may have no venue to work on. In this case, all
those feelings can build up and trigger on some other thing. In my 5 years
of working with cohousing groups, I found this to be true of about 75% of
the conflicts I worked with.

A great exercise as a group is to brainstorm up what are the BEHAVIORS that
build trust. Then when that is done do the same for what are the BEHAVIORS
that erode trust. Then rewrite and post those lists for awhile. This kind of
indirect intervention can provide hugely needed feedback for people with
trust issues and trust eroding behaviors by making them aware of it.

Follow this up, at another time, with a sharing circle about consequences of
trust erosion, what happens when I don't feel trustful? How is this
different than when I do?

When I trust the people I work with, I can easily let go of lots of details,
because I trust those people to handle it. So letting go is a sign that you
trust the group. And letting go is a key element of humility, which is one
of the foundations of consensus process.

But, if you really don't trust people, you can't let go, and therefore
consensus is pretty hard to achieve, because trust is the other foundation
of consensus.

So in the environment where you don't have trust or humility, then consensus
is not a decision making process that will work very well, if at all, and
another choice might be more successful.

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood, where there is still a rental available, and another one coming
up later this summer   www.sharingwood.org

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