The Face Scorecard: How Your Emotional Expressions Shape Team Performance Before You Speak

This episode examines van Kleef et al's (2019) paper called "Emotional Games: How Coaches’ Emotional Expressions Shape Players’ Emotions, Inferences, and Team Performance." The big ideas from the paper that are relevant to coach learning are The Mood Mirror, The Face Scorecard, and The Happiness Advantage. All three of these big ideas contribute to the two immediately applicable actions for coaches. 

The show notes for this episode can be found here: https://thecoachdeveloper.com/coaching-research-to-results-podcast-notes/

Transcript

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You've just had a rough week. A loss? Maybe two. A training session where nothing went right. And now you're standing at the whiteboard before the game trying to look composed. But here's what nobody told you in your coaching course. The second your players walked in the room, they already started reading you. Not your tactics board, you. Your face. Your posture. The way you said hello. And before you've said a single word about formation or game plan, your team has already caught a feeling from you. The question is, was it the one you wanted to give them? This week's research has the answer. And it's a little uncomfortable. In a really useful way. Welcome to Coaching Research to Results. I'm Beth Barts, the coach developer. This is one paper, three ideas, and two actions for tomorrow in under 15 minutes. This is the podcast where coaching research gets off the shelf, out of your notes, and into your practice. Let's go. The paper is called Emotional Games How Coaches' Emotional Expressions Shape Players' Emotions, Inferences, and Team Performance. It was published in The Psychology of Sport and Exercise in 2019. The lead author is Gerbin Van Cleef, who has spent years building a body of work on how emotions work between people, not just inside an individual, but across a room, across a team, and across a relationship. Most of the emotion science and sport had focused on athletes' own emotions, their anxiety, their confidence, their mood states before competition. But Van Cleef and colleagues noticed a gap. Almost nobody had looked at what happens when the coach's emotions impact the athletes. So they ran two field studies, one with Dutch baseball and softball teams, one with Dutch soccer teams. Here's the big idea, and let's give it a name. The mood mirror. What the research shows is that coaches' emotions are not private. When a coach expresses happiness, like enthusiasm, warmth, genuine positivity, players literally experience more happiness themselves. When a coach expresses anger, frustration, irritation, or contempt, players experience more anger. The coach's emotional expression is essentially a mirror that reflects across the whole group. The mechanism here is something called emotional contagion. This is the process by which people unconsciously absorb the emotional states of those around them through microexpressions, body language, tone of voice, and even the rhythms of movement. And this process is particularly powerful when there is an authority or status difference between people. Coaches carry power in the room. That means their emotions travel faster and land harder than the emotions of almost anyone else in the group. So the next time you walk into training feeling the weight of last week's bad result, your players are not just watching your tactics board. They are downloading your emotional state. Okay, idea two. And this might be the most practical finding in the whole paper. The researchers found that players are not just catching the coach's feelings, they're using those feelings as information. Specifically, when the coach expressed happiness, players inferred that the team was performing well. When the coach expressed anger, players inferred that the team was performing badly. This was one of the most robustly reported findings across the studies. The researchers called this the inferential pathway. I'd call it the face scorecard. Your athletes are looking at your expression and reading it like a score. A happy coach means we're doing okay. An angry coach means something is going wrong here. Think about what that means in practice. If you express frustration during a drill, not because the performance is poor, but because you're tired or distracted or someone just parked in your regular parking spot, your athletes may read that as a signal that their performance is not good enough. You haven't said a word about performance, but your face already has. And once a player believes that they are underperforming, everything that follows, their effort, their risk taking, their communication with teammates is filtered through that lens. That's a lot of power for a facial expression you might not even know you're sharing. And lastly, the researchers went one step further and looked at what all of this means for actual team performance. And what they found was clear. With the soccer teams, coaches who expressed happiness before the game had teams that performed significantly better in the first half. Coaches who expressed anger before the game had no performance benefit. In fact, with the baseball teams, anger was negatively associated with team performance. Call this the happiness advantage. It's not simply that positive emotions feel nicer. They appear to function as a kind of performance fuel for the team, shaping effort, coordination, and collective confidence in ways that translate into actual results. Emotions are not just internal reactions, they are messages. A message of happiness from the coach says things are moving in the right direction. That message, received by a room full of athletes, creates alignment, energy, and readiness to compete. Now let's complicate the picture, because that's what good research literacy demands. The effects in this study were not universal. At halftime, the coach's expression of happiness did not significantly predict second half performance. The effects showed up most clearly before the game, when athletes had close access to their coach and fewer competing dynamics. By halftime, the game itself, the scores, individual errors, tactical shifts, had introduced enough noise to reduce the coach's emotional impact on what came next. There's also a limitation that the authors of this study are honest about reverse causality. It is possible that coaches expressed happiness because their teams were already performing well, not the other way around. The time lag design of study two in the Van Cleef paper goes some way to addressing this, but it doesn't fully rule it out. And beyond this paper, there's a thread worth knowing about. Research by Kalo Keranos and colleagues in 2014 found that expressing positive emotions in performance contexts can sometimes carry social costs. It can read as inappropriate or even tone-deaf in high-stakes moments. So the message is not be relentlessly cheerful regardless of the context. The message is more nuanced. Your emotional expressions are information, and the information needs to fit the situation. Let me take you back a few years in my coaching career. Our team qualified for nationals for the first time after building together for seven years. It was a validation of the athletes' dedication to a demanding program and what we as a coaching group had done to support our athletes. We were slated to play the three-time defending national champions in the first round, a towering program with many junior national athletes and several who would make international waves in the future. Imagine my joy as a coach seeing our athletes perform so well as to take the game into overtime. Winning was something I fully felt we could do. But we lost on a penalty in overtime. Our team fully believed that we were capable of being David to their Goliath. It was crushing. However, it wasn't meant to be, and I was perplexed about how I would address the team after the game. There were so many tears. How would I possibly tell them how proud I was when they were totally despondent? And I was too. I had to put on a brave face that honored their feelings while also mirroring the gravity of the situation. We needed to play again and bounce back in consolation, so I tried to honor their discouragement while letting them see only a little bit of my own, even when my heart was in my feet, and it felt like it would never recover. I was honest in my emotions, and yet I was upbeat and focused on the next game. We didn't wallow in our despair, and instead we refocused and won the consolation match. Managing my emotions helped the athletes manage theirs. Let's put this research into action. This week, before your next session or competition, try what I'd call a conscious emotional check-in. Before your athletes arrive, whether that's in the parking lot, the quarter outside the locker room, or at the edge of the pitch, pause for 30 seconds and ask yourself, what am I actually expressing right now? Not what do I feel on the inside, but what does my face say? If it's not what you want to transmit, give yourself a moment to shift it. Think about one thing that genuinely excites you about this group today. A player who's improving, a new idea you want to try, a moment of connection from last week. Let that land on your face first. Then walk in. You are not performing. You're preparing. Notice what happens in the first 10 minutes. Share the face scorecard idea with another coach, an assistant, a colleague, a mentor, and ask them to give you honest feedback after your next session. What did my face communicate today? What might the players have inferred from my early emotional expressions? This is hard to see from the inside. It's much easier from the outside. And sometimes the most powerful coaching development tool in the room is not a reflective journal. It's another coach who tells you the truth. Here's the one thing I want you to take away. Your emotional expressions are not background noise. They are signals. Players are reading your face the way they listen to your voice. Maybe even more. The research from Van Cleef and colleagues is some of the first quantitative evidence of this measured in real games, and the message is clear enough to act on. Hold on to the three labels. The mood mirror, your emotions travel, the face scorecard, your expression is a performance signal whether you mean it to be or not. And the happiness advantage, expressing genuine positivity before competition is linked to actual results. I'm Beth Barts, the Coach Developer. You'll find show notes and the full library of episodes at www.thecoachdeveloper.com. If any idea from today lands for you, like, subscribe, and share it with another coach this week. That's how research actually travels. See you next time. This podcast was produced by Ann Reifenstein at RECETA services. Original music created and recorded by Sean Patterson and Vinyl Safari Studio.