Global Team Productivity: The Role of Trust A global team tasked with developing markets for a business-to- business industrial product found it difficult to develop mutual understanding about dealing with the demands of their different international markets. Team members were from the US, Germany, Sweden, Brazil and the PR China, hanlding US, European and Chinese customers. As it turned out, one of the major obstacles for finding a shared “global” approach was the low level of trust within the team. The trust dynamics had not been articulated, yet were getting in the way of communication and solving a key global-local paradox encountered by many global firms and teams: Local responsiveness and global consistency. In the context of a global team workshop and with the support of the facilitators, the team explored some their different cultural differences in communication styles, which shed light on different expectations, sources of misunderstanding and discomfort within the team. As a next step, the team members (in their culture groups) prioritized which behaviors and attitudes were most important in being able to trust other team members. The differentials between the US and German priorities vs. the Chinese and Brazilian priorities provided a strong “aha” moment about cultural differences in trust behaviors and the different needs within the team. As a consequence, the team leader and team members decided to invest more time and attention in trustdeveloping behaviors that would ensure the engagement of the Chinese and Brazilian team members and allow for effective communication. Note Trust is a significant factor in team productivity, innovation capability and change resilience. Kultur & Management, Inc., provides facilitation and team trust assessment tools to leverage this resource for team and organizational success.