After the Whistle: The 8 Building Blocks for High-Trust Teams

After his conversation with Dr. Paul Zak, Zach dives deeper into the science of trust and what it means for coaches and leaders. Drawing from Zak’s research on oxytocin and high-trust organizations, this After the Whistle episode explores eight leadership behaviors that strengthen connection and performance inside teams. If you want to build a culture where people feel trusted, valued, and motivated to give their best, this episode offers a practical framework to start.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome back to the Win More Live Better Podcast. After every guest conversation, there's usually a few moments that stick with me for a while. Ideas that I find myself continuing to reflect on either in my own life or in the work that I do with coaches and leaders. And in my series After the Whistle, it's where I slow those moments down just a little bit. It's a chance to revisit a key insight from a guest conversation or explore what it might be pointing towards for someone else while also adding some of my own perspective on how we might apply it in our own environments. So today I want to highlight a small snippet from my conversation with Dr. Paul Zack, a professor at Claremont Graduate University, and one of the world's leading researchers on the neuroscience of trust, social connection, and what he calls emotional fitness. So in this After the Whistle episode, I want to build on that conversation and expand on some of his research around trust and how it provides, I think, a practical framework for all of us that any coach or leader can use to strengthen the culture of their team or organization. As I described in the full conversation for this episode, I first learned of Dr. Zach's work and research after reading his book, The Trust Factor. The core premise is centered on how his research team has studied organizations from all over the world and a lot of different industries to understand what creates high trust cultures. And what they found is that trust is built through some very specific leadership behaviors. In fact, most of the variants in trust and organizations can be distilled and boiled down to eight essential building blocks for trust. Now, they summarize those behaviors with an acronym that spells Oxytocin, named after the neurochemical associated with connection and trust in the brain. So what I want to do for this episode is I want to kind of shine a spotlight a bit on some of those eight building blocks, uh, a couple of which we talked a little bit more in detail during my conversation with Dr. Zach. And then I want to just kind of expand a little bit and share how I think they're relevant, particularly in the realm of sport and for coaches. So one of the things that Paul talked about in our conversation together was the importance of recognizing people for their meaningful contributions in what he basically calls uh ovation, which is the first of the eight core building blocks.

SPEAKER_00 2:19

Um so they owe us for ovation. So from a brain perspective, you know, what is rewarded, what is valued by your community is established as a default pathway, something we want to repeat. And so um we found in the neuroscience that um when uh someone meets or exceeds a goal, if they're recognized within a week of that, after a week from the brain perspective, it never happens. If you are rec right away, so I'm giving you constant feedback. If that feedback is public, it's personal, it's tangible, uh, it is comes from peers, it's really important. So we as a community go, oh, we we really value you as a high performer. So there's sort of constant feedback. Um and it's gotta be about you. So uh you hit a really important goal, Zach, and I know you love coffee, and so our next uh team meeting, I bring, you know, a nice basket of fancy coffee and uh mug and whatever, and I then I recognize what you did and share that with the group. So that does a couple things. One is it reinforces your behavior, but also tells the group, Hey, we value high performers. In our community, high performance is really important. So I think that's one of the ones that's the easiest to implement.

SPEAKER_01 3:29

So one of the phrases that I've used often with teams and different groups that I've been part of is that what gets celebrated gets repeated. As leaders, it's easy to become uh what a lot of I think people will oftentimes call uh like a deficit detective, constantly pointing out what's wrong, what needs improvement, what needs fixing. But if we want certain behaviors to actually show up more often, then we also need to be intentional to spot and reinforce them when we see them or when they appear. When effort, discipline, or teamwork gets acknowledged, it's gonna send a signal. And you can replace any of those with any other attribute or quality. But the point being that when they get acknowledged, it sends the signal that this is important and this matters here. And over time, those behaviors become part of the culture. Now, one additional point that I want to mention here is when Paul said you want to praise in public and critique in private. In terms of praise, his and others' research has actually shown that it can actually stimulate oxytocin release in people when they're recognized in public settings. And again, he kind of touched on this a little bit, the importance of doing this in I think a very spontaneous way, but also in a way that's kind of personalized. As he kind of talked about doing so with kind of your standard maybe employee of the month or some kind of routine weekly award or month-to-month award or something like that. Not to say that those don't have any value, but he said that the goal is to make sure that you're also doing so in ways where people are kind of surprised by it. They're they're not expecting to get recognized amongst their peers. And how by doing so, especially then doing it in a way where maybe you're you're not just acknowledging them publicly, but you're you're giving them something or you're um doing something thoughtful that they're gonna find deeply um appreciated, that's a great way to stimulate that oxytocin release, which again helps foster connection and helps build trust. So the first, again, core building block for high trust cultures is what he calls ovation. The second one, um, and I do appreciate here, he kind of they cheated a little bit with this one. The next one is expectation. Uh, in particular, focus on the obviously the X in this word, um, if we're gonna use the the oxytocin acronym, but expectation kind of boils down to don't be afraid of high standards. In high trust environments, they don't lower their standards. That they're intentional to ensure that they keep them high, that they're raised, that they create uh healthy relationships with challenge and clear expectations can give people direction. They can give them purpose. It reminds them of, in a lot of ways, sometimes why they're there in the first place. And I think as we got into in our conversation uh during the full podcast, we talked a little bit about psychological safety and how sometimes it can be vastly misunderstood. And psychological safety doesn't mean that we need to remove challenge or that we need to remove even discomfort. It means create an environment where people feel safe enough to pursue a difficult challenge with others. And part of this challenge piece here can also be the importance of accountability. Clear and challenging expectations in pursuit of something is great, but there also needs to be accountability to the standards within that pursuit. This is one of the reasons why coaching and high performance can be, I think, sometimes really difficult. Because it is a very what are you kind of doing for me lately kind of industry. You can do everything right for an extended period. Let's say for the first few years taking over a program, you win, you perform well. But if in year four you don't maintain the standard, like there are some examples where coaches lose their jobs and it because they've fallen maybe below um again what that standard is that has been previously set. And whether it's fair or not, I think just in a lot of ways, that's kind of how life works. And and the good news though is that high standards and high challenge can also help facilitate greater levels of performance for individuals and teams, which Paul and I kind of discuss a little bit more when we discuss the benefits of stress and in kind of those healthy levels of stress, both at an individual and collective level. Now, the third essential building block that he touches on is what he calls yield, which you can think about this as like autonomy or giving people ownership in sport. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that all of a sudden you just hand the keys over to your players and you let them run the whole program. But it does benefit you to invite them sometimes into the process. A good example is when coaches allow players to take the leadership rein in certain moments. And I think a lot of coaches that I know and I talk to a lot, they discuss the importance of having leaders within the locker room and that player-driven leadership. Um, whether that's a player running a timeout, whether it's a player speaking up, taking the reins during maybe like a film session with the group or some sort of meeting. I think you see this with certain great coaches. Um, take Steve Kerr, for example. There's there's, I think, routinely clips of him empowering his players and inviting them to step into leadership roles, like particularly during timeouts. Um he again, he's transferring ownership to them. And when you do that, engagement and investment can increase with it. Now, the fourth building block is what Dr. Zach and his team describe as transfer. So think of this as like the sharing of information um across all aspects of the ecosystem and across the organization. So one of the very key findings that I remember um highlighting in his book is that 40% of employees in a lot of cultures and organizations feel well informed about their organization's goals, vision, and kind of philosophies or strategies. Now, if you didn't catch that, I said 40%. I don't know about you all, but that doesn't sound like a very high number to me. And I think in sport, this same challenge can um exist at times. The bigger the organization, the easier it becomes for information to stay siloed or to not get distributed to all the pieces. And and again, I think the more coaches you talk to, the more you hear them describe the importance of not only crafting a vision, but then being really intentional and deliberate to remind people constantly of that and how we are working towards it, what's working, what's not working, and so on. And uh I think this was in my episode with Jack Mullaney. Um, this was my first guest interview of 2026. That for those that want to maybe go back, um, I highly recommend checking it out because I thought Jack shared a ton of great nuggets for coaches and leaders from a lot of different angles. And one of the things that I like that he shared is that he sends a weekly email. So for those that don't know, he is the head coach of the Northern Arizona Hoka Elite professional running team. And he's got athletes from all over the world, a lot of different spaces. They're all kind of competing in different training cycles, in essence, like they're not all on the same schedule and things like that. And so one of the things that he tries to be intentional with is sending out this weekly email to kind of let the group know like where people are at, like what they're preparing for, um, maybe even um what have been some recent successes, or uh again, kind of to use some ovation here and recognize people um who are making progress or getting better on something. And I just I thought this was a great example of making sure that people in the organization feel connected to. I don't know how many people are familiar with Layla Hermosy, but um one of the things that she does, uh, I follow a small list of email newsletters, hers being one of them. And the reason why I like hers is because in essence what she does is she sends out this weekly message to her company and to the people in it. And sometimes it's about her, things that she's wrestling with, challenges that she's working through, things that she's learning. And sometimes it's more geared towards the collective and where they're at as a group and and what's upcoming uh for the team and and the culture and so forth. So again, just a couple of examples. I'm not saying that is how all of us have to necessarily do this, but that point that he raises of making sure that information is transferred broadly and openly is really critical for creating alignment and connection. So then that brings us to openness. That's the next building block. Think of openness like vulnerability, or when leaders are willing to show, we'll say, like humanity, like the human side of the person behind the role, when they're willing to maybe admit things like mistakes, um, when they're able to model um not just self-reflection, but self-compassion, uh, and they're able to talk about ways in which that they're trying to grow, and maybe inviting even feedback from their from their uh people about that as well. We talk a lot about what it means to I think be a mentally tough athlete, but one question that I think about often is like, what does it mean to be a mentally tough coach or leader? And sometimes I think it's being willing to say I got that wrong. I uh I messed that up. One great example of this came from Liam Cohen. Uh, he's the Jacksonville Jaguars head football coach back in October. There was a viral clip of him admitting to the team that he had made a mistake in their last game. The cool part though is like one of his players tried to still take ownership of it during this film session with this team, but Cohen like didn't budge from the fact that he was equally, if not more, responsible for the mistake. And in a press conference later, he was kind of asked about it, and he said, You're not correcting the player, you're correcting the play. And there's a standard of execution that we hold, and everybody is held to, and we're no different as coaches. And so again, I thought that was a really great, um, just kind of somewhat recent example that I've seen uh where a coach was willing to acknowledge again a failure, a mishap, and uh and and be kind of vulnerable amongst the group. Next building block is caring. I think this one's pretty simple, but that doesn't mean that it's any short or shorter in terms of how powerful it is. People perform better when they feel cared for, not just as performers, but as human beings. Um, again, I kind of touched on this during the guest conversation where we talked about Pat Riley. When he took over for the Miami Heat, one of the first things he prioritized was making sure that players knew each other as human beings, not just as teammates. He wanted his players to know about each other's families, their backgrounds, their stories, their heroes, and so forth. And that connection can build trust. And as Dr. Zach has found, trust is that essential lubricant to success of teams and organizations. So getting down to the last couple building blocks here, the next one is invest, which is really all about growth. So high trust leaders, organizations, they invest in their people, not just what they can do today, but who they can become tomorrow. Um, and I think in the realm of sport, I say this often that this doesn't just apply to athletes, this applies to the staff too. Great programs, just develop people and not just performers. And again, that extends beyond just players to the people that are responsible for developing their players, uh, whether they're on the coaching staff, the medical staff, the support staff, and so on. A better individual in all facets of that ecosystem is gonna hopefully help create a better environment for the players. And then lastly, the last um building block here is what he calls natural, which think of this as like authenticity. Great leaders, they don't just try to imitate someone else's leadership style, they they find their own. And one way that I like to look at this actually comes from a quote. Uh, it's from Larry Wingitt, and he says that the goal is to find your uniqueness and exploit it in the service of others. Let me say that again. The goal is to find your uniqueness and exploit it in the service of others. I don't really care what industry we're talking about, whether it's sport, coaching, um, corporate business, wherever, to me, I think that's leadership. Not just copying someone else, but discovering the unique way that you can serve the people around you and then pour that service into them. So all this to say, um, I don't this probably is a touch redundant, but the thing that I love about Dr. Zach and his work is it just illustrates how important those high trust environments are. And what they've consistently found is that those high trust organizations consistently outperform low trust ones. Um, and then on top of that, it's built through behaviors and not just words. And and I think the coolest part in all this is everything that we've talked about here, I think is very learnable. Um, anybody can improve uh these aspects um as a leader. And I actually talked to somebody about this recently. He kind of came from more of like the insurance world, and one of the things that we we landed on was there's a lot of leaders that become they're very comfortable with like what he called like the hard assets, where um think of that more like the concrete, like the numbers, the technical aspects of the job, um, the financial, the business strategy, and so forth. But he said we need more leaders that are good with the heart assets. And I thought that was really good. Leader, we need more leaders that can connect on a deeper human level and recognize and honor the humanity and other people, and then are not afraid to share that um or share their own humanity within all of that. So all this brings me to I'd invite it, all of us, take those eight behaviors, those eight building blocks of trust, evasion, expectation, yield, transfer, openness, caring, invest, and natural, and simply ask yourself, where are we or I strong? And where might we or I have some blind spots? And then finally, if you enjoyed my conversation with Dr. Paul Zach, I highly recommend checking out this book, The Trust Factor. It's a reminder that great cultures, again, they don't happen by accident. They're gonna be deliberately designed, and more often than not, they're gonna be built through these small leadership behaviors that over time create something even better and even more extraordinary. A team that's going to be built on trust, and teams built on trust are capable of really doing remarkable and exceptional things. Thanks.