Five tips on building trust in your project teams

Project professionals play a crucial role in fostering and sustaining trust throughout a project’s life cycle. Creating a project culture where trust is truly established requires a project manager or leader to deploy effective strategies. Below are five tips to help you on your way.

1. Clarify roles and responsibilities

Ambiguity around roles is a significant source of tension. Team members who are uncertain about their responsibilities may avoid necessary actions, leading to passive-aggressive behaviours and inefficient outcomes. Common signs of role ambiguity include phrases like ‘I didn’t want to step on their toes’ or ‘I’m not trying to throw anyone under the bus, but...’. These seemingly considerate comments reflect underlying confusion and potential conflict avoidance, ultimately harming team cohesion.

Clarify roles upfront, especially with a new team who may not have worked together before. An early meeting to define everyone’s roles and responsibilities will ensure no one is uncertain about what they are supposed to be doing and how their role interconnects with other roles. Also, be sure to evaluate, learn and adjust roles regularly. As the project progresses, it may be necessary to shift the way tasks are handled. Having regular reviews will ensure the team remains aligned as new challenges arise or changes become necessary.

2. Predict and prevent conflicts

Project managers must balance hands-on management with strategic oversight. Observing team interactions from a broader perspective helps anticipate emerging issues. Negative or irritable interactions might signify deeper problems such as personality clashes or inadequate resources.

Use evidence and data to build the big picture. What is the project dashboard telling you? Are deadlines increasingly being missed? Are common roadblocks emerging? Are you seeing increasing absence or attrition levels? What is the latest company engagement or pulse survey telling you about sentiment in your team?

Remember to take the temperature. Have your antennae up for any subtle but significant shifts in the general atmosphere and climate of the team. Do people seem more stressed and less communicative than usual? Is it possible that the pressure has become too intense, but team members are afraid to speak out for fear it will make them look incapable of doing their jobs?

3. Foster collaboration

Silos undermine collaboration and erode trust. Team members withholding information or overly protecting their work signals a breakdown in collective responsibility. Such behaviour often arises from feeling undervalued or experiencing unfair treatment.

A manufacturing firm struggled with departmental silos; each department guarded their information closely, afraid others might gain undue credit. The project manager introduced regular cross-functional meetings where departments shared progress, challenges and insights. These meetings dramatically improved communication, reduced silos and rebuilt trust across teams.

You need to create collaborative spaces. Organise regular check-ins where team members can talk openly, share challenges, listen to each other and clarify misunderstandings. This is a great opportunity for the project manager to facilitate dialogue, adopt a coaching approach and build trust between individuals.

It’s important to reinforce shared objectives. Make sure everyone is aligned around the project’s ultimate goal, ensuring each team member understands how their work contributes to the bigger picture.

4. Banish the blame game

Blame creates defensive reactions, escalating conflicts and damaging relationships. Encouraging curiosity over criticism fosters healthier dialogue. Listen first to understand. Practically applying active listening means fully engaging, withholding judgement and seeking clarity about the speaker’s perspective to genuinely understand their views, feelings and underlying intentions before responding or acting.

You must also suspend judgment. Marshall Rosenberg’s work on Nonviolent Communication suggests moving away from implicit blame towards the use of non-judgemental language. When a problem arises, avoid accusatory phrases like ‘Why haven’t you done this?’ in favour of neutral, observational language, such as ‘I’ve observed that this deadline has been missed and I’m wondering what your perspective is? Do you have any suggestions as to how we can minimise the impact?’

Engaging team members positively in the conversation will help prevent defensiveness and move the focus towards learning and solutions.

Make requests, not demands. Frame your feedback as requests, rather than instructions. ‘Stop, start and continue’ is a useful framework for conversations. For example, ‘I’d appreciate it if you could stop doing X as it’s having an unhelpful impact, but I really appreciate your efforts to focus on Y, so please carry on, and if you could start doing Z, I’d really appreciate it.’

5. Prioritise performance management

Ignoring poor performance rapidly undermines trust, negatively impacting morale and productivity. Addressing performance issues promptly and fairly demonstrates commitment to high standards.

A consultancy faced internal morale issues because senior management overlooked a team member’s repeated errors due to their seniority. The issue impacted morale, as others felt their contributions were undervalued. Addressing this decisively with timely, constructive feedback rebuilt team confidence and reinforced accountability.

Provide timely, constructive feedback. Be clear and direct when giving feedback about poor performance and address issues as soon as they arise, but also praise and reinforce good behaviour. Acknowledge and appreciate the good work your team does. Positive reinforcement strengthens trust and team cohesion. Finally, demonstrate accountability by leading by example. If you hold others accountable, they’ll trust that you’re serious about maintaining high standards and values in the team.

Listen to APM Podcast’s episode ‘How to have difficult conversations’ wherever you get your podcasts.