By Michael Nagorski, Founding Partner, Double Loop Performance
Ask someone to describe the best team they ever worked on, and they don’t typically reach for org charts or performance data. They say things like: I could say what I really thought. We pushed each other. Nobody was protecting turf. When something went wrong, we fixed it instead of hiding it.
They’re describing psychological safety, though they rarely use that phrase. They’re describing trust as a structural condition, not a feeling that just appeared one day.
Viktor Frankl, the San Antonio Spurs, and a dozen organizations in this current moment are all teaching the same lesson. The question is whether leaders are learning it.
The Problem Isn’t Trust. It’s That We Treat Trust Like a Variable, Not a Condition.
Most organizations treat trust as a byproduct. Build the right incentives, hire good people, run a fair process — and trust shows up. It doesn’t work like that. Trust is a condition that has to be built before performance asks something of it.
The Spurs are a useful case study here. When asked whether the weight of playing alongside David Robinson and Tim Duncan felt heavy, Victor Wembanyama’s answer was immediate: “No. It feels safe. It feels like if I were to fall, there are people there to pick me up.”
That sentence is worth reading twice. A player competing at the highest level in one of the most pressure-filled environments in professional sports did not describe his culture as demanding, intense, or focused. He described it as safe. And that safety, far from softening performance, is exactly what enables it.
Gregg Popovich built this over decades. Not through speeches about trust, but through behavior — showing up, asking real questions, caring about players as people first and athletes second. That model looks soft from the outside. From the inside, it produces five championships and a culture that players from other teams openly admired from the sideline.
Caring Out Loud Is a Strategy
There’s a cultural moment happening that’s worth paying attention to. When the Spurs beat Oklahoma City, footage of Wembanyama in tears after the win went viral. The reaction wasn’t mockery. It was recognition. The meme around it was direct: nonchalant is over. Caring is in.
This isn’t just cultural sentiment. It maps directly to what the research says about high performance.
Brené Brown has studied trust and vulnerability across organizations for over two decades. Her data from the Dare to Lead work — five years of asking leaders what their direct reports do to earn trust — produced two answers that surprise most people. The first: ask for help. The second: show up when something hard happens personally. Attend the funerals. Be there.
Neither of those answers sounds like a performance lever. Both are.
When a team member knows their colleagues will show up for them as a person, the cost of being honest at work drops. The cost of admitting uncertainty drops. The cost of saying I don’t know or I was wrong drops. And when those costs drop, the quality of information flowing through a team goes up, improving decision-making, problem recognition, and tightening feedback loops.
This is what Adam Grant describes as the puzzle of public goals: people know that declaring what they want creates accountability and support — the research on this is strong — and yet they rarely do it. Why? Because declaring what you want also means people know when you don’t get it. They’ll see you hurt. That’s the real risk. And it only becomes manageable in an environment where vulnerability isn’t used against you.
Organizations that want faster, cleaner decision loops have to build this first as a structural precondition and not as a culture initiative.
What Shame Does to Performance
Here’s where organizational development literature and sports research converge. Shame doesn’t improve performance. It degrades it.
This isn’t a therapeutic claim. It’s a behavioral one. When the cost of failure is humiliation, people stop taking the risks that produce growth. They sandpaper their reporting data. They hedge their recommendations. They wait to see which way the wind blows before committing to a position. The result is a team that looks cautious and “safe” to manage and operates well below its ceiling.
Popovich’s coaching philosophy is a direct counter to this. He holds his players to a high standard, and he does it without shame. The combination of high expectations and genuine care is what produces the behavior he wants. Not fear. Not pressure. Not performance reviews. Care, standards, and a team that trusts the relationship enough to absorb both.
Organizations confuse compliance with capability all the time. A team that has learned to comply under pressure looks productive in the short run. The tells show up later: in turnover, in stalled innovation, in the pattern-recognizers who stop raising what they see because they’ve learned the organization doesn’t want to hear it.
Psychological Safety Is Not Comfort
This is worth saying directly because it’s the most common misreading of the concept.
Psychological safety does not mean everyone agrees, conflict disappears, or hard conversations are avoided. Amy Edmondson, whose research at Harvard defines the modern understanding of the concept, is explicit on this point: psychological safety is the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. That’s different from nice. It’s different from easy. It’s what makes hard things possible.
The Spurs aren’t a warm, frictionless culture. They’re a culture where friction is productive. Players get pushed. They’re held accountable. They’re asked to grow. The difference is that the challenge comes from people who have demonstrated they’re invested in your success.
When someone who has shown up for you says you can do better than that, it registers differently than the same words from someone whose investment in you is unclear. It’s how the nervous system processes social information.
What This Looks Like in Organizations
The same dynamics play out in any environment where people are asked to perform under pressure, collaborate under uncertainty, and commit to outcomes they can’t fully control.
A few things that matter operationally:
The first few minutes of any interaction are diagnostic. Does the leader open with curiosity or with an answer? Does the meeting start with “here’s what we’re doing” or “here’s what I’m trying to understand”? People read these signals quickly, and they calibrate their honesty to match what they see rewarded.
Multiple input channels are not a nicety. Some of the clearest thinkers on any team are not fast processors in high-energy group settings. Requiring real-time verbal contribution as the only legitimate form of input means you’re optimizing for a specific cognitive style and calling the result “team decision-making.” Written pre-reads, asynchronous input, and structured reflection between meetings surface better thinking from more of the room.
Feedback has to be specific to land. “Good work last quarter” is noise. “You surfaced that risk six weeks before anyone else saw it and it changed the outcome of that deal” is signal. Specific feedback tells people what they did, which is what makes it possible to do it again intentionally.
The gap between what leadership says and what it does is the most expensive gap in most organizations. People watch behavior, not messaging. If the stated culture is “speak up” and the observed culture is “don’t challenge leadership in public,” the observed culture wins every time. Closing that gap requires leaders who are willing to be wrong in public, to change their minds on the record, and to thank people for the challenges they receive rather than managing around them.
The Double Loop Version of This Problem
The reason most culture work is ineffective is that it addresses behavior without examining the assumptions underneath it. Organizations run training programs, install feedback tools, and run engagement surveys. Some of those things help. None of them change the governing beliefs that drive the actual behavior.
Chris Argyris called this single-loop learning: detect the error, adjust the action. What doesn’t happen is the harder question: Why did we build a system that makes honesty costly in the first place? What belief is underneath the structure that punishes the people who see things early?
Popovich doesn’t just coach differently. He thinks about the human being differently. His assumption is that players perform better when they’re cared for as people. That’s not a policy. It’s a mental model. And it produces a completely different set of decisions about how to structure practice, deliver feedback, build relationships, and respond to failure.
The organizations where trust is a genuine structural condition are the ones where leadership has done the second loop. They’ve asked what they believe about people, examined whether those beliefs hold up, and built systems that reflect the answers honestly.
The Question Worth Asking
The best team you ever worked on probably didn’t have the best strategy, the most resources, or the least friction. It probably had a level of honesty that made friction productive rather than corrosive.
That didn’t happen by accident. Someone created the conditions for it. Maybe deliberately. Maybe without realizing it. But the conditions existed, and performance followed.
The practical question for leaders is: What is the cost of being honest here, and am I actually lowering it — or just hoping someone else will?
The answer to that question determines most of what happens next.
Double Loop Performance works with executive teams, sales leaders, and change practitioners who are ready to examine the assumptions underneath their systems — not just the systems themselves. If this resonates, the RENDER diagnostic is a useful place to start.
About The Author
Michael Nagorski is the Founding Partner of Double Loop Performance, an organizational development and leadership consulting practice based in Newark, Delaware. He works with executive teams, change leaders, and facilitators who are tired of talking about the right things and ready to actually do them.
Michael has spent more than 15 years helping organizations at inflection points — when they need to move differently without losing what made them good. That has ranged from designing decision-making frameworks for Fortune 500 sales organizations to building facilitation systems for senior leadership teams navigating strategy execution, technology adoption, and culture change.
His work lives at the intersection of facilitation design, behavioral science, and organizational accountability — with a strong bias toward the practical over the theoretical.
He holds graduate degrees from the University of Delaware in Organizational Development and Change and Business Administration, and is the developer of the MEET Funnel methodology for structured decision facilitation.
Contact Double Loop Performance or contact Mike directly through LinkedIn.