Building Team Trust in Transactional Times

In late October 2008 on a Friday night in Columbus we were meeting with our Penn State offense the night before a massive top-ten road game against Ohio State. Normally, Friday night meetings were spent reviewing the game plan, looking at the opponent’s video, and talking through various situations.

That night I decided to take a different approach. We had the nation’s most dynamic offense, one that would finish among the all-time top ten in Big Ten conference history in several categories. But this game was going to be about toughness and fundamentals over flash — and it is not easy to get people to adjust tactics to win a challenge in a different way.

I started by paraphrasing a concept I’d learned growing up in Catholic elementary school: “Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”

“Tomorrow,” I continued “at some point in the game we are going to have to take the ball and run it over and over again. We are going to have to out-tough them and impose our will.”

Then I said to the offensive line, “We trust you guys to get the job done. And you will.”

There was no way for me to know what would happen the next day. We had expressed our trust in them, but did they have the same trust in us?

In 2025 trust is perhaps the most valuable commodity of all in a transactional world that preaches “Me” over “We.”

How do you get people to buy into trust over transaction?

One of the things that was a guiding force in years of coaching was a saying: “I hope I don’t lose your friendship because I tell you the truth.” It was paraphrasing another Bible passage. I’m no biblical scholar, but like many other historical texts, the Bible holds lessons on human nature that resonate across time and cultures.

Being honest with each other sounds easy. But when honesty points out flaws or areas where improvement is needed, it is a tough sell in an age where the transactional relationship is ascendant in almost every aspect of society.

“Transactional” relationships are everywhere. Given the massive upheaval in college athletics — from an amateur model to an unregulated professional model — coaches everywhere are talking about building relationships with players that are “transformational” and not “transactional.”

Clever soundbites make good sales pitches, but delivery on the sales pitch is what matters. Earned enduring trust is what carries you through times of crisis that can shake the confidence of even the staunchest ally.

How do we build that?

• Relentless honesty is vital.

I coached for two different Hall of Fame coaches: George Welsh at the University of Virginia and Joe Paterno at Penn State. They had a similar approach to honesty with their coaches, staff, and players.

Both Welsh and Paterno demanded that we be honest with our recruitment. We did not make false promises about playing time or tell lies to get players to sign. In a time when illegal and illicit inducements were widespread, strict adherence to NCAA rules was non-negotiable. Many programs were built quickly only to be destroyed when disgruntled players burned by phony promises revealed rules violations that brought NCAA sanctions.

Welsh and Paterno had success that endured for decades because the foundations were set on honesty, which is the basis for transparency. Sure, they were hard on players. Players may not have always liked them, but almost without exception the players respected them. Respect is always more important than being liked.

And when adversity arrives, that respect is what allows the team to endure and overcome setbacks.

• Unflinching foundational core values matter.

When starting out, the head of any organization must look in the mirror and ask themselves what they and their organization stand for. That is where we define the core values that make up the foundations of every decision.

In college football you lay out those values the first time you meet a potential team member. We would tell players that we had three goals for them.

The first goal was to graduate with a meaningful education. The second goal was the pursuit of team success and championships. The third goal was personal success and a potential NFL career. The goals were stressed in that order. If they shared that same prioritized vision for their future, we told them they could be a good fit for our team.

One highly-sought player being recruited by every major school heard our pitch and said, “I realized they had more to offer me than I had to offer them.” He came to Penn State, graduated, won the Big Ten title, and was a first-round NFL draft pick.

The players with no interest in education or being great teammates were never going to make it here. And no one wins when one team member falls by the wayside.

As times change, tactics will change. The strategies will change. But core values must not change. You must maintain that foundation. Any team can understand, adopt, and accept changes in tactics. Abandoning core values jolts everyone into uncertainty that damages morale and focus.

• Dialogue and communication must be a two-way street.

There is a temptation to cultivate an army of “yes people” who will reinforce our every impulse and proclamation. And even if you don’t set out to have a legion of yes people, as success grows things change. As people get more and more proximity to a locus of power, there is a natural desire to want to stay there.

Most people are inherently or instinctively trained to become pleasers who believe holding onto their position requires unquestioned fealty to leadership. No matter how much trust was established initially, this creates the most transactional of all relationships.

Most great leaders have both supreme confidence and an inner voice of doubt. They know getting comfortable leads to complacency. They want honest feedback by fostering a two-way dialogue that brings realistic assessments — both positive and negative.

When I wrote my first book, my literary agent Al Zuckerman had a reputation as a tough critic and told me that before we even signed a contract. The early drafts of my book proposal came back with lots of honest feedback, some of which bordered on disheartening.

But when the book was finally published, he called me to tell me that I’d done a great job. It gave me a great sense of pride because I’d done something that Ralph Waldo Emerson gave as a definition of success: “to earn the appreciation of honest critics.”

That process was all possible because Al, his staff, the publisher, and I had developed a team that was built on trust and not on transactions. The scope and focus of the book were shaped and reshaped repeatedly and resulted in a book that reached #1 in its category on Amazon.

A team built on trust attains steely confidence in one another forged in the crucible where honesty boils away impurities that lead to weakness.

The strength of a leader and the team come from that trust standing on the foundations of core values and shielded from the whims of quickly passing fads that surge and wane.

Back in Columbus I left that team meeting, looked my own doubt in the mirror and said to myself, “We’ll see what happens.”

The next night in front of 105,711 hostile Ohio State fans and millions more watching on TV, the moment presented itself in the 4th quarter. Trailing by three points, we told our guys on the sideline that the moment had come to run the ball to win the game. The whole offense had a look of determination and confidence fitting the moment.

We ran the ball on 7 of the next 8 plays to score the go-ahead touchdown. On the next possession we held a tenuous four-point lead late in the game. We ran the ball ten straight plays, at a time when everyone in the stadium knew we were going to run it.

The trust and faith in each other resulted in another score and a seven-point top-ten road win in one of the toughest environments in the country.

As the clock wound down on that late October night, a great win was secured — but not just in that moment. Faith was possible because of hard-earned trust in one another rooted in two-way honesty over time.

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Written by Jay Paterno.
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