Andrew Longley – Article 4 – Trust & Psychological Safety

Andy is a team performance expert with a background in psychology & applied neuroscience, who will over the coming months share insights ground the art and neuroscience of high-performance coaching. Each article will share a little of the latest applied neuroscience plus give simple tips on how to practically bring it to life in your own coaching.

Great to be back with you. In my Third article I introduced you to the coachup model of high-performance teams and coaches, which you can see below. We looked at the science behind having a shared in-group identity & enemies (not a person) in order to stimulate team empathy & elevate teamwork.

The coachup.academy model of high-performing teams/coaches

Today we’re going to take a look at another fundamental part of high-performance coaching. We will focus on how to create trust and a sense of psychological safety. Just like in-group team identity is, shared trust and a sense of psychological safety is also at the heart of inclusion & creating a sense of belonging for your athletes. You will love this article if that’s one of your focus areas.

Great coaches nurture trust in all relationships and intentionally build a sense of psychological safety within their teams because it’s the foundation on which all other high-performance conditions are built.

Without trust and psychological safety, we cannot buy-in to our shared purpose, we cannot openly share information & learnings, we cannot build a sense of teamship, we cannot truly collaborate, and we cannot perform because we will be stuck in a ‘threat state’ each day. This is because as humans we are social creatures first and foremost and without our conscious knowledge our brains are constantly scanning for social threats and if we detect one, we enter a ‘threat state’ which is the kryptonite to high-performance.

One of our biggest perceived threats is exclusion. When we feel excluded and outside of the group we also feel isolated, vulnerable and anxious. In fact, the same region of our brains activate when we experience social pain like exclusion, as it does when we feel physical pain like a broken bone. Our brains treat both the same way! This is why removing the threat of exclusion and nurturing trust and inclusion are so pivotal to high-performance. Because after all, we couldn’t perform optimally if we had a broken arm, could we?

Let’s go a little deeper and bring this to life by exploring what happens to us when we’re detecting a threat state:

Our amygdalae activate when they detect a threat. They could be triggered by such things as: danger approaching, dealing with someone we do not trust, feeling excluded, or worrying we’ll be laughed at if we ask a ‘dumb question’.
We release stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline ready to mobilise.
Our blood flow and energy is diverted from normal essential functions like digestion and towards the muscles in readiness for action.
The part of our brain responsible for higher cognitive functioning (pre-frontal cortex) like decision making, problem solving, interpersonal communication & creativity is supressed.
Our peripheral vision narrows and our memory is impacted.

So now, reading this list you’ll see that with all of this happening we’re clearly not going to be in a high-performance state and ready to collaborate as part of a team.

On the flipside, when we trust our teammates and we have a genuine sense of psychological safety we’re able to remain in a performance state where we can problem solve, innovate, make better decisions, collaborate, plan, remain calm and experience much better wellbeing. Which would you prefer?

But you don’t have to take just my word for it. I’d like to tell you about a ground-breaking piece of research called project Aristotle from Google. Briefly, Google wanted to know what their best performing teams had in common so they could bottle it and replicate it. They conducted a huge piece of research looking at 180 teams across 2 years and the findings surprised them. The best performing teams weren’t the ones with the most experts, the smartest or the most experienced people, but the ones which had the strongest sense of psychological safety. This was what led to higher performance.

So, what really is psychological safety? It’s best described as a team environment where every person feels safe to be themselves, their true self ‘boots ‘n all’ and not having to assimilate to the group norms or ‘mask’ who they really are. It’s when every person feels included. Feels safe to learn & ask questions. Feels safe to contribute ideas and their thoughts. Plus feels safe to challenge and test assumptions with positive intent. Understanding this definition, we can see how a high-performing coaching or sports team will be much better when every team member is more cognitively effective, more creative, more engaged, more supportive, more likely to seek clarification to understand, more likely to offer ideas and draw from their unique experiences, and more likely to challenge ideas and decisions to improve their quality. A practical example of one way to do this is to ask each of your team members to privately send you a song which has ‘personal meaning to them and elicits memories of great times in sports’. Then you compile this list of songs for your team. Then at the start of each training, bus trip or team get together play one of the songs when the team are gathering (on repeat if necessary). When all are present, ask the person whose song it is to share the story with the team of why they chose this song, why it’s meaningful to them and what memory it elicits. This way the team is learning about each other as people beyond the sport and it’s also connecting the person to great memories from sports. After all team members have shared their story and song over time, you’ll all have a better appreciation of who you are as people. Plus, you’ll also now have a team playlist for this season! An activity like this not only builds up psychological safety via inclusion, but it also builds trust via creating intimacy between the team.

So as coaches, when we foster trust in all team relationships and build a sense of psychological safety amongst the whole team, we’re creating a best performance platform possible.

Here is a short practical list you could start with to create Trust and Psychological Safety:

Trust

Be consistent and reliable wherever possible.

Build up each person’s credibility in their area of expertise.

Foster a sense of intimacy where team members form positive 1:1 relationships.

Be selfless and team focused. Reduce all real and perceived sense of self-interest because this kills trust.

Psychological Safety

Invest time in relationship building & learning who we are as people beyond sport.

Include family members where possible so we meet the whole person.

Role model asking for feedback to grow.

Demonstrate vulnerability by sharing your own challenges and mistakes.

Encourage open communication about both successes and failures.

Review mistakes through the lens of learning.

Break down any alliances or cliques.

End an info session or similar with the team having to come up with at least 3 clarification questions between them (this normalises questions and creates the habit of seeking clarification).

Invite quieter members to contribute in the team environment.

Invite deliberate challenge in to stress test a key decision or idea.

So, there we have a little of the applied neuroscience behind why fostering trust and a sense of psychological safety is so critical to high-performance coaching. Also, you could do exactly the same activities with your coaching group, or management group because it’s fundamental to any team’s performance.

The fifth article in this series in the new year will focus on why a high-performing coach must co-create with their athletes meaningful goals and how to craft these. And spoiler alert, it’s got nothing to do with SMART goals which are far from effective to drive human behaviour. Stay tuned.

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