Part II - Creating Collaboration, Trust, and Transparency
In Part I of The Art of Team Building (link to article), I discussed a component of the process behind, and the importance of, understanding your team’s strengths and weaknesses. Gathering this information is the crucial first step towards building a high-performance work team. The second phase of the process is establishing building bonds between you and your team, and as well as with each other.
In order for a leader to foster collaboration, they must first galvanize a team through trust, transparency, and honesty.  
Leadership by Loyalty, Unification through Transparency
To establish loyalty, the leader must give it. Implicitly.  This absolute must exist,  because any deviation inverts the entire equation.  Loyalty is not necessarily reciprocal in nature, but it is hoped for and ultimately gained, as you will not be trusted out of the gate. You will have to produce results in order to attain their trust. To facilitate results, a leader must envision and forecast a series of events that will occur over the course of a project and the working relationship, and communicate those expectations to their team. From there, the leader must then establish a hierarchy of goals that vary in complexity. These goals will serve to deliver on the expectations and drive the team to succeed, inherently making the leaders’ “predictions” come true. The easier goals serve as low-hanging fruit and will establish the foundation of your credibility with the team. The more difficult goals will solidify the trust your team will gain in you as you continue to deliver at all levels. If you think of trust as a hub-and-spoke, the leader initially acts the hub of trust to the rest of the team. Over time, the trust organically spreads throughout the rest of the group, bringing them closer together to promote collaboration and high-performance.
Transparency is the paramount trait that will help strengthen and unite your team. Operating in this space ensures that your team sees and knows everything happening in your area. It unites everyone in that there are no secrets, no “favorites” between team members, and gives everyone an identical view of the playing field. Since your group can see the same field in very different ways, it is through transparency that you empower them to provide their intellectual interpretation of situations based on their unique view. The individual insights provided will come from your heat maps that you discovered from Part I of this blog series, are the ground floor for establishing a collaborative environment.  
The Transparent Team in Action - The Jam Session
Trust, loyalty and transparency together create a workspace that will be the breeding ground for a great team bonding experience: Visualize a room that has its own feel, where each team member can play his or her favorite musical artists while working on colorful, compelling process maps. There are process maps hanging on the walls of this room that are  used as “reusable code”, containing all the ingredients to reduce the cycle time needed to create present and future states. The collaborative brainstorming sessions that take place in this room become legendary for rapid deployment of ideas.
The group assembles, loads up a process or infograph work in progress, and someone plays their favorite musical genre while thought capital is exchanged. Each team member takes a turn selecting his or her favorite music. But the inclusion of music in this collaborative workspace goes beyond mere enjoyment. Music provides intimate insights about each team member, revealing additional depth to the personality.
Building this community of “jam sessions” with the team huddled around becomes the norm.  A “forget what you know” approach is established,  and the team works to create the vision for the organization through the architecture of its future state.  In this creative, open and collaborative think tank, born of transparency and trust,  ideas will seem to flow into a state of synchronicity.  Over time, alliances will form among your players, alliances so deep that you may notice the team begins to finish each other’s thoughts.
Trust = Safety = Advanced Collaboration
During these brainstorm sessions, the entire group has the security to safely observe and experience the full range of human interactions and  emotions, negative and positive behaviors (jealousy, blaming/accountability, sycophancy, etc.).  Your expertly crafted think-tank environment sets the stage for productive, organic discussions to bring these behaviors to the surface, and more importantly, to move interpersonal issues toward quick resolutions.  Within the realm of the team whose hierarchy is established on a foundation of trust and transparency, the “Alpha-dog” position rotates naturally and without conflict,  based on the subject matter at hand, creating a state of equality.  
The team must not remain on middle ground with each other or the team as a whole. They must get psychologically naked by revealing their strengths, weaknesses, and insecurities with each other.  Doing this sets a clean slate.  Creating opportunities to air differences, sometimes even forcing such airing to occur, is the foundation for relationship building. Placing the individuals in a game of choice with each other on an opposing matter or behavior trait will bring about the free will to choose the negative or positive outcome together.  This will produce the first team challenge, and will be the flash point where trust and loyalty are established.
”There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.” -Ayn Rand
An example of this is an individual who constantly bickers with a teammate. Place them in a “safe” environment without fear of repercussions with leader moderation and let them go at it. The leader can study the manipulations of each side and assist in driving the anger or disagreement to the least common denominator. Once you uncover the heart of the matter you can usually decipher cause and effect. There is a less than one-percent chance that you will have a situation that is truly beyond repair. Even those, with time can be addressed through a similar exercise in a group setting. The individuals must choose where they stand; the diffusion creates an automatic bond, and the group gravitates toward a more definitive level of understanding.  
A group that can resolve differences “within the family” will reduce human resource-related issues by relying on their strong relationships.  This advanced conflict resolution process is one of the most valuable assets your organization will gain by laying the groundwork of trust and transparency, in your effort to cultivate a truly collaborative team.

In future blog entries for this 4 part series the remaining topics will be covered:
Part III - Knowledge Cubes & The Art of Foundational Process
Part IV - Autonomy - Fostering Self Determination - The Utopia of Team Building