Building Trust with the Triple H Exercise

One of the things that never ceases to amaze me is how little executive teams know one another.

One of the lessons my first Company Commander in the Royal Marines taught me was…

‘get to know your men, develop a strong understanding of who they are and what makes them tick. If you don’t know them, they will assume that you don’t care about them. Their perception of your leadership is all that counts and if they don’t think you care about them, they won’t trust you…’

Over the course of my seven year career, I refined an approach to ‘getting to know my men’, creating a process which went something like this;

• Where did you grow up, where did you go to school, what does your family background look like?
• Why did you join the Corps?
• What have you done since joining?
• What do you want to do in the long-term? Do you want to be a future Regimental Sergeant-Major or do you want to leave after a few years?
• Do you have a girlfriend? Are you married? Do you have a family? How old are your children?
• Where do you spend your weekends?
• What do you think your development areas are?
• How can I help to make you successful?

It wasn’t just a question and answer session, it was a conversation designed to give me some insights into what made them tick and how I might be able to help them.

I have altered this process for the civilian world and have advised leaders to use it in order to get to know their people better. Recently, I read an article which shared an alternative and more powerful version.

The Triple H exercise has nothing to do with the WWF Wrestler, although having listened to him interviews on the Tim Ferriss podcast, I think he demonstrates a high level of vulnerability. It is an exercise designed to humanise people by getting them to demonstrate vulnerability. The impact of this is that it changes your perspective on the individual.

Transactional Relationships

When you join an organisation, chances are you get introduced to people along with their job title. Immediately, you create an association with that individual and their role. So when introduced to, ‘John, Head of Marketing’, you associate John with his role. This sets the relationship up to be transactional. If you’ve got an issue related to marketing, you’re going to speak to John and often the relationship doesn’t develop from there. Six months later, when asked, ‘how well you know John’, you realise that you might know bits and pieces about him but the reality is that you don’t know that much about him.

If you’ve had to enter into any sort of conflict with John, there is a good chance that the relationship has deteriorated. You’ve written him off as ’someone you don’t get on with’. This exercise is designed to get past that perception of someone else by demonstrating that they’re a person with their own personal baggage, doing their best to overcome their own challenges with the skills and the tools they’ve developed over the years.

The Triple H Exercise

Each person takes it in turn sharing the following;

• A Hero: Someone that has inspired them. Who are they and what did they do?
• A Hardship: What’s the most challenging thing that they’ve been through?
• A Highlight: What’s their greatest achievement?

If you’re leading a team of people, try this exercise with them. If you’re the leader, make sure you go first. Be authentic. If you fake it, people will pick up on it.

High performing teams are built on a foundation of trust. If you trust your team mates, you can have honest and difficult conversations with them. You can disagree and challenge each other knowing that it won’t be taken personally or be used against the other person in the future.

It’s a simple exercise that only takes a few minutes per person. Time well spent – good luck!