By Dean Newlund
When it comes to companies or teams partnering together, the more complex the project, the greater the need for a one team culture—one grounded in trust, vulnerability, and a willingness to engage in healthy debate and honest feedback. Without that, it becomes easy for individuals to disengage or quietly abandon the opportunity altogether. This work is already difficult; it becomes even harder when people don’t genuinely enjoy working with—or trust—those around them.
So what actually solves this?
Not an over reliance on stale update meetings and “copy all” emails to cover your ass. A different kind of roadmap—one that builds trust while doing the work.
I’ve seen this work best when it follows a clear progression:
1. Reconnect as People Before Solving as Partners
Before any meaningful work can happen, the room has to shift. When people take the time to engage beyond roles—through honest questions, shared experiences, and real listening—something subtle but important changes. Defensiveness softens. Curiosity returns. Without this step, everything that follows sits on shaky ground.
2. Make the Real Purpose Visible
Most teams think they’re aligned on why they’re together. They’re not. When each group or leader articulates the problem they believe they’re solving—and how—they often reveal different mental models. Naming those differences early prevents confusion later. It turns silent misalignment into something you can actually work through.
3. Build a Shared Vision That People See Themselves in
A vision only works if people feel ownership of it. When individuals define what success looks like—and then shape it together—it becomes more than words. It becomes a shared reference point. Something the team can return to when decisions get difficult or priorities compete.
4. Tell the Truth About What’s Working—and What Isn’t
Looking back through the lens of that shared vision creates a different kind of conversation. It moves teams out of defensiveness and into learning. What helped? What got in the way? Where did we fall short? This is where credibility starts to build—when people are willing to see reality clearly.
5. Anticipate Failure Before It Happens
This is where the work sharpens. I often introduce this through a pre-mortem—a concept developed by Gary Klein—where the team assumes the initiative has already failed and works backward to understand why. It’s a deceptively simple exercise, but it unlocks a level of honesty that’s hard to reach otherwise. What emerges is rarely about external forces. It’s about the internal dynamics we tend to overlook. This is also where I draw on the lessons from How the Mighty Fall. Collins describes how organizations don’t collapse overnight—they drift. Blind spots go unexamined. Assumptions go unchallenged. Signals are missed or ignored. The pre-mortem brings those blind spots into the light, allowing people to say what they’ve been sensing but haven’t articulated and surfacing the relational risks—misalignment, lack of clarity, avoidance—that quietly derail even the strongest strategies.
6. Surface Blind Spots and What’s Been Unsaid
Every team has things sitting just below the surface—assumptions, hesitations, unspoken concerns. When those are explored openly, the work deepens. People begin to understand not just what’s happening, but why. This is where trust either strengthens or stalls.
7. Define How You Will Work Together Going Forward
Only after moving through the earlier steps does it make sense to establish guiding principles. At this point, they’re not theoretical—they’re grounded in shared experience. How will we communicate? How will we challenge each other? How will we handle tension when it shows up?
There’s nothing overly complex about this model. In fact, it’s straightforward. But it requires discipline and a great facilitator. Because most teams try to skip ahead. They move quickly to vision, strategy, and execution—hoping alignment will follow. Sometimes it does, briefly. But without trust, it doesn’t last.
When this sequence is followed, something different happens.
- People stay in the conversation longer.
- They engage more honestly.
- They work through tension instead of around it.
And most importantly—they don’t walk away when the work gets hard. Because when the work is complex, the culture you build together isn’t separate from execution.
It is the strategy.