How Do You Build Trust?
“I understand what my weaknesses are. When I don’t have expertise in an area, I do have trust in the people that are around me.”
When the Pittsburgh Pirates introduced John Baker as the team’s new director of coaching and player development, Baker emphasized a key tenant of his philosophy: Trust.
“If you’re asking people to put themselves at psychological or emotional risk, where they may be failing from time to time, and you haven’t created that foundation of trust systematically, it’s not going to work,” Baker told reporters.
A foundation of trust is critical in the development process at any level. If players don’t feel they can trust the leadership or their guidance, individual growth will flatten. It can cost professional teams millions as prospects stop getting better. It can make college programs decline. It can cause headaches for high school teams and clubs.
Part of the reason the Pirates struggled to help players reach their full potential, Baker said, is because too often in the past, they tried to make players into something they were not rather than assisting them in becoming the best versions of themselves.
As a coach or instructor, you have to earn the players’ trust. It takes time, repetition and effort.
“Creating trust” often feels like a buzzword thrown around that successful teams have and unsuccessful ones lack. But what are some ways that trust is created in a team setting?
In writing The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle’s examination of successful and unsuccessful organizations found three foundational elements that help increase trust in successful ones:
Build safety. Create a sense of belonging and bonding among team members.
Share vulnerability. Having a sense of mutual risk will drive production and development.
Establish purpose. Create a shared set of goals and values.
The biggest decision any team might face is establishing a purpose.
Biologically speaking, our brains are designed to seek others who share the same purpose as us. You want your team to have a deep passion for driving toward a shared goal or purpose. Purpose links people together and a purpose increases trust in one another.
Coyle highlighted a study of tech start-ups in the 1990s that considered three different types of models: the star model, the professional model, and the commitment model. The star model focused on the best people, the professional model built around a team with a specific skill set, and the commitment model developed the group around shared purpose. When the tech bubble burst in the 2000s, the companies following the commitment model survived at the highest rate. Essentially, those with a shared purpose were stronger, longer.
What should your purpose be?
Author Daniel Pink warned against focusing it around external factors, such as individual awards or winning state titles. This creates situations where losing suddenly becomes viewed as failure and not a learning opportunity. A shared purpose should be intrinsically driven. Is it to make players the best versions of themselves? If so, design the rest of your time around that singular purpose. If you align your practice time and in-game philosophy around that purpose, like Bill Walsh said, the score will take care of itself.
Creating an environment that shares vulnerability in your team can help increase the buy-in. Vulnerability starts with the leaders. That means, as coaches and instructors, being open about making mistakes or admitting that something doesn’t work.
By being honest about your own shortcomings, other people will be encouraged to do the same, thus building more trust. This is what Coyle calls vulnerability loops. This sends the message that “we are learning together.” It is important because when people feel that they can share information freely, it allows positive change to happen much quicker.
In Think Again, Adam Grant found that organizations and teams with strong vulnerability loops had a better flow of feedback from all levels. Because team members were empowered to inform leaders when plans or processes were not working, adjustments were made quickly and road blocks were removed. Vulnerability loops are good in sports settings when leadership is often centralized. Residing in the periphery (assistant coaches, staff, and players) is tacit knowledge waiting to be tapped into.
The Pittsburgh Pirates may have fallen into the trap of not listening to feedback from their players or coaches. Baker modeled the preferred behavior in his press conference. He was asked about how he would make player evaluations and he admitted that it was not his strength and that he would be using other resources in the team to gain that information.
“I understand what my weaknesses are,” Baker told the media. “And although I am looking to figure out different ways to bring those things up for this value of continuous learning, when I don’t have expertise in an area, I do have trust in the people that are around me.”
One of the hardest things to do as a coach or instructor is to appear vulnerable and say “I don’t know” but doing so can be important to making everyone better around you. By saying “I don’t know” you are willing to defer to others perhaps more knowledgeable than you on a certain topic. By saying “I don’t know” you are acknowledging you have a blind spot in your education and can take the steps toward learning more about the subject.
Finally, by building safety, players can be reassured they can fail without immediately losing their jobs.
If a pitcher needs to work on a new pitch or incorporate new mechanics, they should not feel as if they are one bad outing or bullpen away from being reassigned. Same goes for hitters who are redesigning their swings. Baker understands that from a player development perspective, his organization is going to ask people to put themselves in challenging situations that will result in a high degree of failure. In practices -- which, when planned properly, should have a good amount of challenge -- players should feel they can fail without losing status.
Grant highlighted research that showed focusing on short-term performance success can be an obstacle in long-term learning. If you praise a player for constantly fielding routine balls properly or barreling batting practice fastballs, this might keep them from working on making more difficult ones or facing higher velocity. The person believes that the reward is in executing the task flawlessly and therefore avoids situations that might disrupt their perfection -- situations that might push their skill boundaries and make them a better player -- and ultimately stifle their development.
“If you don’t have a reason or a purpose behind a drill package that you’re trying to introduce, or a place you’re trying to send them that’s better for their development, you’re not going to have that kind of trust,” Baker said.
By reassuring them that they will fail and that the failure in practice is preferred, the players can begin to get better instead of worrying about their status. They will begin to view the sessions as opportunities instead of moments of potential defeat.
Trust is not created overnight.
You can work on this by establishing a purpose that guides your team, allowing yourself and others to be vulnerable, and building safety by reassuring players that failure leads to growth.
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