The Missing Link In Senior Team Success: Trust

In senior leadership teams, focus is often on providing individuals with support to help them do their jobs better. Increasingly this will come in the shape of individual executive coaching for which research has consistently indicated that performance improves over time with coaching support. No team ever wins a world cup without a coach. Yet there are many many corporate teams in the world who are muddling through, trying to hit budgets and manage teams to ensure their staff remain happy and motivated. It is often assumed that the executive Board or senior teams ‘know best’. Whereas in fact, the senior teams may be rife with politics, power games and playground antics that would shock middle-management employees.

The Overlooked Factor

One reason for this can be easily explained. One that any employee at any level may intuitively know but even those at the highest levels still don’t appreciate: trust.

Trust functions as the social lubricant that turns a collection of high-calibre individuals into a high-performing unit. A meta-analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology shows that team trust explains a significant share of the variance in collective output—Dirks & Ferrin (2002) found it accounted for up to 20 percent of performance differences, while Breuer et al. (2016) confirmed the effect across virtual and face-to-face teams. More recently, Salas et al. (2020) argued in Group & Organization Management that trust is the “keystone” linking psychological safety to learning behaviours such as constructive conflict and joint problem-solving.

How Team Performance Coaching Builds Trust

Yet every one of those studies highlights a critical caveat: trust is an emergent team-level property, not an individual competence. Coaching the chief executive to listen better or delegate more—valuable though that is—cannot by itself cultivate the reciprocal confidence that colleagues will keep promises, share information, and have one another’s backs. In fact, improvements in a single leader can sometimes widen the perceived gap between that leader and peers, inadvertently eroding trust.

This is where team performance coaching becomes indispensable. Purpose-built interventions that surface shared goals, renegotiate norms and rehearse collaborative routines create the conditions under which trust can grow—or be repaired when it has been damaged. Individual executive coaching polishes the soloist; team coaching unites the whole orchestra.

Final Thoughts: Trust Is A Team Property, Not An Individual Skill

High-performing senior teams are not built on technical ability alone. They are built on a foundation of trust, supported by targeted team development. Team performance coaching is one of the most effective ways to build that foundation, enabling senior teams to lead with confidence, cohesion, and resilience.

If your senior team could benefit from improved collaboration, stronger relationships, and higher performance, now is the time to take action. Speak to the experts at Centre for Teams to explore how tailored team performance coaching can unlock your team's full potential.

Get in touch with Centre for Teams to start the conversation.

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References:

Dirks, K. T., & Ferrin, D. L. (2002). Trust in leadership: Meta-analytic findings and implications for research and practice. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(4), 611–628. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.87.4.611 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Breuer, C., Hüffmeier, J., & Hertel, G. (2016). Does trust matter more in virtual teams? A meta-analysis of trust and team effectiveness considering virtuality and documentation as moderators. Journal of Applied Psychology, 101(8), 1151–1177. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000113 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Salas, E., Bisbey, T. M., Traylor, A. M., & Rosen, M. A. (2020). Can teamwork promote safety in organizations? Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 7, 283–313. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-012119-045411