Establishing Mutual Trust

By: Wade Gilbert

Originally Published in: Coaching Better Every Season

Athletes will never reach their peak performance unless a deliberate and sustained effort to teach and build trusting relationships occurs between teammates and between athletes and coaches. At the beginning of a career, most coaches focus on building their knowledge of the game. But with experience, the best realize that more time should be spent on building relationships. Hall of Fame volleyball coach Mike Hebert summed it up well when he shared,

As I entered the final years of my career, I realized that I was on the verge of identifying the most important element in building team success. Without it, there can be no journey to the top. No dynasties. No championships. But if you can harness its power, you will find your program on the way to levels of achievement that had been impossible before. The element I am speaking about is trust.

I vividly recall a conversation I had with a national team coach shortly after the team, which was expected to place high in the world championships, was prematurely eliminated from the tournament. We both noted how odd it was that athletes, including one who was recognized as the best in the world, did not perform well at the world championships but were now again dominating the game with their professional teams.

What changed in a few weeks for these athletes? They were still competing against the world's best, but now they appeared much more relaxed and confident. Why couldn't they compete like that with their national team? We realized that what plagued the national team was a culture of distrust. This circumstance commonly occurs when teams are put together quickly and coaches and athletes do not have enough time to build trusting relationships through shared experiences.

Mutual trust is defined as being comfortable with exposing vulnerabilities, fears, weaknesses, and needs with others. Trust allows athletes to focus their time and energy on the business of getting better and contributing to team goals by releasing unhealthy and energy-sucking worries about potential motives and consequences of the actions of coaches or teammates.

Trust rests on the assumption that the moral standards and intimate details of a relationship will not be violated. This concept is perhaps the most important one for coaches to grasp when planning how to build a cohesive team. Every single athlete and coach is vulnerable, all the way from young novices up to world champions. Achieving peak performance depends on the degree to which coaches and athletes feel comfortable exposing and sharing vulnerabilities, so that they can provide each other with the necessary emotional, physical, and technical support to overcome challenges and sustain positive momentum.

Dr. Brené Brown, whose TED talk on the power of vulnerability has been viewed nearly 25 million times, explains that being vulnerable requires the courage to allow others to see our imperfections. Through her extensive research she has found that showing vulnerability is a sign of authenticity that fosters trust. Furthermore, the ability to show empathy and experience things like love and belonging requires vulnerability. Many of the greatest coaches of all-time reference love as a cornerstone of their successful coaching philosophy, including John Wooden, who described love as acting in the best interest of each athlete. Clearly, the willingness to embrace vulnerability is critical for building meaningful and trusting coach-athlete relationships.

Leadership scientist Kurt Dirks conducted a landmark study with 30 American collegiate basketball teams that showed beyond a doubt the power of trust and the way in which it directly influences team performance. A series of trust surveys and interviews were matched with a wide range of potential factors that could influence team performance (e.g., prior team performance, coach and player experience, team talent level).

Athletes' trust in their coach had a significant effect on the team's winning percentage. In fact, teams that reported the highest levels of trust in their coaches performed the best. Conversely, teams that reported the lowest levels of trust in their coaches performed the worst; the least trusted coach was fired at the end of the season on a team that won only 10 percent of their games. Team performance measured over the four years before the study also had a significant positive effect on the athletes' trust in the coach. Collectively, these findings show that trust in the coach is partly based on the coach's prior record and in turn directly affects future team performance.

Other research corroborates this conclusion, showing that coaches will appear more trustworthy if they have a past record of modeling core values and respect (reputation), are currently modeling core values and respect (performance), and demonstrate self-confidence, professionalism, and dignity (appearance).

One of the most common mistakes that coaches make is underestimating the amount of time and effort needed to build trusting relationships with athletes. Trust is perhaps the most valuable asset of high-performing teams, whether it is a team comprising a single coach and one athlete or a large team of dozens of athletes and coaches working together. Trust is the foundation and core cohesion. Coach Urban Meyer summed it up well when reflecting on the keys to winning the inaugural College Football National Playoff Championship in 2015: "I am convinced that this unique bond was the fuel that energized our championship run. It would not have happened without the enormous investment we made of teaching and building trust among our coaches and players.”

Trust can be thought of as confidence in someone else's character. Trust has sometimes been described as a bet that you make based on your assumptions about how others will react in relation to your own behaviors. For example, an athlete demonstrates trust in her coach and teammates when she is willing to take a calculated risk during a competition. She is betting that her coach and teammates will not reprimand or belittle her if the risk results in failure.

We cannot expect our athletes to trust us, and each other, simply because we are the coach or because we play on the same team. Assuming the role of the coach is the launching point for building a bank of trust. Much as regular deposits must be made to a bank account to offset withdrawals, coaches and athletes must make frequent deposits to their trust account to build and sustain healthy relationships. This approach is consistent with that used by championship high school coaches to build athlete character.