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Episode 168: Revealing Trust In Teams with guest, Georgina Woudstra

• Garry Schleifer

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Ever watch a team light up in a workshop only to slide back into silence the next week? We dig into why that happens and how to create change that actually sticks by revealing trust instead of trying to teach it. With master certified coach and author Georgina Woudstra, we unpack a practical, emergent approach that helps teams make real contact, notice hidden dynamics, and run simple experiments that reshape how they relate when the stakes are high.

Georgina shares a vivid senior team story: a colleague unconsciously seeking the CEO’s validation, a room holding its breath, and a pause that turned into a breakthrough. You’ll hear how naming what’s happening in the moment—without blame—opens space for people to say what they’re feeling and why. Then we move from awareness to action with graded experiments: shifting eye contact, redistributing attention, and studying the impact together. The results are tangible—clearer thinking, calmer conversations, and a pattern that becomes reliable over time.

We also clarify psychological safety versus trust. Safety is the felt permission to speak without fear; trust is the reliability of that permission across meetings and pressure cycles. One safe moment isn’t enough. Repeatable, well-held encounters build a dependable rhythm that teams can count on when the heat rises. Georgina frames the coach as a steady container—a crucible strong enough to hold transformative work—who slows the room, surfaces the invisible, and helps the group stay connected as truth lands.

If you’re ready to move beyond personality instruments and one-off workshops into real team coaching, this conversation offers a clear path: the team is the content, the moment is the curriculum, and trust grows through consistent contact. 

Watch the full interview by clicking here. 

Find the full article here.

Learn more about Georgina here. 

To learn more about team transformation with Georgina, check her podcast ‘Teams Transformed’

Grab your free issue of choice Magazine here - https://choice-online.com/


Garry Schleifer:

Welcome to Beyond the Page, the official podcast of choice, the magazine of professional coaching, where we bring you in-depth insights and in-depth features that you just won't find anywhere else. I'm your host, Garry Schleifer, and I'm excited to expand your learning as we dive into this latest article, have a chat with this brilliant author, and uncover the learnings that are transforming the coaching world. Join our vibrant community of coaching professionals as we explore groundbreaking ideas, share expert tips and techniques, and make a real difference in our clients' lives. Remember, choice is your go-to resource for all things coaching. But for now, let's dive into our podcast.

Garry Schleifer:

In today's episode, I'm speaking with Master Coach, and author Georgina Woudstra, who is the author of an article in our latest issue, Trust. Why is it intrinsic to coaching? Her article is entitled, Trust Isn't Built, It's Revealed: An Emergent Approach to Relational Safety. A little bit about Georgina. Of course, she is a Master Certified Coach, as I mentioned. She also holds an ACTC, which she's going to tell us about. She's an author and leading voice in shaping team coaching as a profession. As the founder of Team Coaching Studio, she champions an emergent approach that taps into the intelligence of the team in the moment. Love that. Her book, Mastering the Art of Team Coaching, is highly regarded in the field. Through her teaching and thought leadership, she equips coaches to work courageously in complexity. Georgina, thank you so much for joining me today.

Georgina Woudstra:

Thank you, Garry. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here and to have a chance to connect with you and talk about trust and working with teams.

Garry Schleifer:

Yes. Thank you, because I think you were one of the few people that submitted an article that had anything to do with teams. And I'm really glad that it was you, considering you hold the ACTC, which is the

Georgina Woudstra:

Yeah, the accredited certification team coaching.

Garry Schleifer:

There we go. It's the International Coaching Federation's certification for team coaches. So congratulations on that. But I mean, you were already a thought leader in this. That must have been kind of easy for you to get on that one.

Georgina Woudstra:

Well, you never know what they're really going to assess for, and it was a new certification. So in the first round, the pilot program was a bit clunky as things are on a pilot, but we got there, and it was a great learning. You know, I got some good insights out of it too. So I strongly recommend it for for any team coach out there.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah, well, thank you. So I guess it was kind of easy for you to consider writing for us when it came from that aspect and also your emergent conversation. So I want to dive right in because when I was rereading it, I was like and I want to say this quote from from the article, just for those who are listening and haven't may not have the article or have read it. This article explores what it means to cultivate team trust in teams, not by teaching it, but by enabling it to emerge. So tell us more about that. That it isn't built, it's you say it's not built, it's revealed. What does that mean?

Georgina Woudstra:

Well, I start by saying that oftentimes when I get asked to coach a team, somebody calls me up or sends me an email. But the story is something like, you know, we've hired the best people. There really are some of the best people in the industry. And they're all-star players in their own right, and they're paid a fortune. So why can't they work together? And we need them to be a cohesive team and to work as one team. And we think, frankly, the biggest issue is trust. So this comes up over and over again. And maybe the listener like me, when I started out in team coaching 25 years ago, what I would have done was try and find a book on trust, like Speed of Trust, or it's loads of books like that. Try to understand the theory so that I could teach it, and then see if there's a workshop out there or an assessment tool or some way I could workshop it with the team. And usually I'd do that, and the team would enjoy the experience, but the peak of the experience was in the workshop, and then the fizzle effect happened, which is when you know,

Garry Schleifer:

Keep learning, thanks back to work.

Georgina Woudstra:

Yeah, exactly. It's all gone, it's evaporated as fast as it was gained, and I had the experience that it was a bit like wallpapering over damp walls, you know, the it kept coming back. It was really unsatisfactory. So my quest really for the last 25 years has been how to create sustainable, lasting transformation in teams, and trust is one area that's that comes up in nearly every team. So this is it really, which is instead of running the conventional workshop where we teach a concept about teams about trust, say, and then run exercises, how do we touch into it differently? And that's really what I was writing about in the article.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah. Well, you wrote about a story about rebuilding trust in a senior leadership team. So what did you actually do differently? You know, obviously it's not teaching. What did you do that helped shift the dynamic and increase trust?

Georgina Woudstra:

Well, I didn't write much about building the container in the article. I went more straight into the into the intervention. But the first thing as a practitioner, I always think about with any team, and I see any team as different. I don't believe in these standardized normative models of team. Every team I've encountered over the years has different people, different context, different world they work in, different forces shaping them. So I think about building a container, and by that I mean getting into contact with the team and getting them into contact with themselves. And you know, Garry, so often if you observe a team in conversation, it's like fireworks shooting off in different directions, and and contact is the moment when there's an actual encounter, when they meet each other, it's an I thou experience. So when I feel listened to and heard, not just you summarize back, but when I feel heard, when I feel understood, and when you feel heard and understood, and when we're having a dialogue around the same topic, the same theme, contact happens. So trust in that way cannot be created just by understanding a model. It's built like putting marbles in a jar, as Brene Brown would say. The marbles expand in the jar through each moment of encounter and how we are met. So that's my first step is contact initially with me because I'm a safe harbor when I go in to start working with a team. So I need to be very conscious of how I show up and get my head instead of thinking about an agenda and what I'm gonna do and the model or anything like that, be energetically available, be human, be vulnerable myself, be in there with them. The container starts to build, and and it's something that only really comes with practice. You start to sense that it's shifting and you can take more risks. And then what I do is find artful ways of naming what I'm noticing. And really, it's about making the invisible visible because a lot of dynamics are invisible, or nearly all dynamics are invisible. It's like the sort of iceberg, yeah.

Garry Schleifer:

Right, that's what I was picturing. Yeah, exactly.

Georgina Woudstra:

Yeah, like that, and I think that's a big part of our role is making these undercurrents and tensions and possibilities, revealing them in a way that they can be seen, heard, and worked with. And one of the reasons they don't get revealed is because people don't have a language. You know, life doesn't teach us often to have these kinds of conversations. Most of us feel awkward about naming stuff that we feel uncomfortable about, which is why it stays buried. And so as a coach, I need to artfully be able to name that experience and then work with that. So I would name, for example, I was working with a team last week where I noticed that one that there was two men in the team, one's the chief executive, and about seven women in the team. And as one woman was talking, all the time she was talking, she was looking at the chief executive. And I had the sense that she was looking looking at him for something. So I paused the team and said, I noticed when you're speaking, you seem to be looking at him. I wonder what's happening there. Would you be prepared to say a little bit about how you're feeling right now? And she said, Well, my heart rate's just gone out, and that's floated.

Garry Schleifer:

So did mine in listening to you ask the question.

Georgina Woudstra:

I mine.

Garry Schleifer:

Okay,

Georgina Woudstra:

Yeah, okay. You know we're making contact with something significant. And she was very brave. She said, I'm looking at him because I need his validation. I'm looking for his agreement because in my experience, if I don't get it right, I get put down or shut down, and then that's it. I've kind of lost lost the plot and I can't think anymore. So as she was sharing that, other team members I could see were nodding just slightly, they were prepared to take a huge risk.

Garry Schleifer:

They were all paying attention then.

Georgina Woudstra:

They were signalling. So then I unpack that and say, anyone have something similar going on? And we slow it down, slow it down, stay with it, get all voices heard, get the chief executive's voice heard. So we're staying with that figure, as we call it that figure, until it's understood from the different perspective. So my job is to keep them in contact with each other, to hold the space, to make the visible, the invisible, to create exchange around that, slow it down even more if and if people's heart rates are going through the roof, then also to calm down the the collective nervous system.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah.

Georgina Woudstra:

So that we can stay in contact with each other. And it takes a bit of learning and practice. But the interesting thing, Garry, is it's actually easier because the skills I'm talking about coaches can take into any team coaching scenario. You know, we're talking about trust today. You use the same skills, whatever it is that that they need to work through. I don't have to go away and read a book on decision making or critical thinking or innovation, which is when I started out what I used to do, because I thought I had to know the answers.

Garry Schleifer:

Right.

Georgina Woudstra:

A bit like in one-to-one coaching, where yeah, that's often how we start. We feel we need to be experts in something and share the wisdom.

Garry Schleifer:

m Okay, so I have to ask, what did leader what was his reaction or action? What happened when they spoke?

Georgina Woudstra:

Well, played out for quite a while. He said, if you're gonna be a member of this executive team, then I need you all to speak up and speak your truth along those lines, and then she and they said it's very difficult to because of the way that you respond.

Garry Schleifer:

Right.

Georgina Woudstra:

You exhibit such frustration, and then you shut the conversation down by saying it's not that it's this way, and you say it with real clarity and authority, and everybody shuts up. And he recognized that because he's seen that pattern play out, the team going quiet and shutting up. So then the next step is so awareness is created, and that's taken some work to get there. The next step is experimentation. So then I offer an experiment based on the phenomena that's been revealed, and what that looked like in this situation was I have an idea, let's let's try something, Garry. Let's try next time you speak, speak to all the team members, make eye contact with all the team members except the chief executive. Let's play that for 10 minutes and see what happens. And I'm not teaching them. This isn't here's let's have a time to think round or a round robin or here's how to have the conversation. I'm not giving them the right way to do this is. I'm just changing the pattern so we can see what happens and learn from it. So that ran for 10 minutes and I stopped and said, How was that for you? And she said, it was so much easier. My thoughts were flowing, and because they were looking at me and they were nodding and were encouraging me, I felt hurt and more ideas came out. And then the team members said she was really clear because sometimes she over talks and we can't follow it because she's nervous. She was really clear. This is what we heard you say. Did we get you? Right. So we learned something there, and then you keep working at that, what we call the point of contact.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah.

Georgina Woudstra:

So then we said, okay, let's try this with all teams, let's try it with the chief exec out of the room. And instead of her being in the spotlight, let's have the conversation with all of you now speaking your truth about something. So that's called grading, where you start off with a relatively safe intervention based on the team or group, and then you step it up, take a bit more risk, a bit more risk. And all the time they're learning through each encounter that they can trust that they're going to be met.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah.

Georgina Woudstra:

They can trust some consistency about how others respond. And when you do that over multiple sessions, it becomes a new way of engaging, a new way of connecting, a new way of relating, a new way of being. And it won't go back because it doesn't need to.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah. What a wonderful example of not only the container that you built and use, but also the emerging of the trust, the way you, you know, just guided it and I don't even want to say that, but yes, right, helped it, right?

Georgina Woudstra:

Helped it, yes. And you know, I think one of the principles is that I used to think I had to bring the content. And then the big ah-ha for me was the team itself is the content.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah. Yeah.

Georgina Woudstra:

Same as with a one-to-one client. We're not going into a one-to-one session with a client. You you had a session this morning, you told me, or just just earlier today. I doubt you prepared for that session by saying, you know, at 9 a.m. we're going to start with the check-in, and then 10 a.m. I'm going to take the client through this self-awareness exercise.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah, no.

Georgina Woudstra:

And then 10:30, we'll debrief that. And then, you know, yeah, we stay in contact with the client and we follow their lead and work with what they bring, like molding clay.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah, no kidding. Wow. Thank you. What a great example. And for going beyond the page, what we couldn't fit into the article you just gave a wonderful example of. So thank you. When you were saying that, it reminded me of your distinguishing between trust and psychological safety. And I'm wondering how that fits into working with for the coach to work with teams.

Georgina Woudstra:

Yes, yeah. It's one of those things that various practitioners and academics have been have been quite adamant about distinguishing between sometimes perhaps too adamant because they are interwoven. But I see psychological safety feeling that I can speak up in this group and without retribution, without shame, and that I can take risks. And so it's really about that quality of experience, of lived experience in this relationship, and trust is more to do with reliability and consistency of contact. So in that session that I described, if we did that as a one-off moment, psychological safety would build. But can I trust now or could the team members trust that the next time they take a risk and speak up that they won't be shut down, that their views will be respected and heard, there'll be a high quality encounter. Well that needs reliability and patterns over time. So I might have a psychologically safe moment, but do I trust that that's consistent? Do I trust that that's reliable? So they're interwoven in that way for me.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah. And yet distinct.

Georgina Woudstra:

And yet distinct, yeah. And one builds on the other. I think it's difficult to have trust without psychological safety, because when there's no psychological safety, what are we trusting in? If there's no psychological safety, people don't speak their truth.

Garry Schleifer:

Right.

Georgina Woudstra:

They try and survive, yeah. Survive a meeting.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah.

Georgina Woudstra:

And therefore, what are we trusting?

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah, and in your example, it could have gone totally the opposite way if the executive didn't, wasn't self-aware, wasn't listening and not taking it personally, but more merely as a reflection of their leadership.

Georgina Woudstra:

Yeah, and that can happen. You know, it takes a lot of building up to these points, building up relationships, building what we call you know, a container, a strong enough container. I think about it like one of those beautiful old crucibles that we used for melting down different metals for alchemy to happen. And the crucible need to be really strong because of the fierce heat that they contain. The stronger the work we do, the deeper the work we do, the more transformative the work we do, the stronger that crucible needs to be and that means we have to slow the work down and focus on contact before contract.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah. Wow. Thank you so much. I mean, we could talk about this team. I would drill down into this, but unfortunately, we don't have that much time. Maybe in a team and group coaching issue, we'll get to that. What would you like our audience to do as a result of the article in this conversation, Georgina?

Georgina Woudstra:

Thank you for asking. The listener maybe read the article.

Garry Schleifer:

Well, that's definitely if you're listening and haven't read it, read the article. Thank you.

Georgina Woudstra:

And then another step might be to listen to our podcast, which is called Teams Transformed. It's on all the major platforms. And then myself and my colleague Alad De Jong are in dialogue like this about emergent team coaching. And then if if people would like to visit our website, which is www.teamcoachingstudio.com, they'll see on there a free discovery session, and we run them periodically and we run them emergently. So you get a bit of an emergence experience. And if people are really interested, then reach out and get in touch with me on LinkedIn and find out more about how you can get trained with us. That's the purpose of the Team Coaching Studio, really, is to is to create coaches who can who can really make a lasting transformative difference in the teams they coach. Because collaboration matters more now in this world than I think it has ever mattered before.

Garry Schleifer:

No kidding.

Georgina Woudstra:

We've got to cross the divides for something different to happen. So for anyone who's interested, yes, reach out and get in touch.

Garry Schleifer:

Well, I think a lot of people will be. Team coaching is not just a new thing, the value is deeply felt in our industry, and I think a lot of people would like to know more, and that sounds like a great way to get their feet wet.

Georgina Woudstra:

Yeah, and there's many different forms of team coaching. It's you know, whereas coaching is a mature profession, in that in many countries people know that coaching is about unlocking potential, it's not about fixing people, it's not remedial, it's not about teaching or providing solutions. Many organizations and people know how to buy it, how to package it, how to contract around it. But team coaching is new, it's a new much newer. It's an emerging profession and that means clients have many haven't experienced team coaching. They've experienced team development workshops, the stuff I used to do that's personality instruments and combined with a team charter.

Garry Schleifer:

Right.

Georgina Woudstra:

So partly we're in a in a phase at the moment where we're educating organizations about what the potential of team coaching is. And as always, in an emerging market, it's a bit tricky because there's a lot of people out there saying they're doing team coaching when they're really running a traditional team development workshop. The clients' experience is that's what they're taught team coaching is. It's a workshop with a personality instrument and a team charter.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah.

Georgina Woudstra:

So it'll take a while till it's yeah.

Garry Schleifer:

And yeah, you've been doing it for 35 years, so don't tell me it's something new.

Georgina Woudstra:

Well, I've been for the since the turn of the millennium, about 25 years. I've been started coaching in 1993 and then got in about turn of the millennium to team coaching and trying to work out what it actually is for myself because at the time there were no books out there, no nothing to be followed. I had to scratch my head and work it out.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah, we did, didn't we? I've been doing it for 24 and a half years at least. It was a profession term, you know, and ICF and all those sort of things were already existing. Well, thank you again. So team transformation, no team, hold on.

Georgina Woudstra:

Teams transformed.

Garry Schleifer:

Your website?

Georgina Woudstra:

Oh, teamcoachingstudio.com.

Garry Schleifer:

I was on the right tack. Teamcoachingstudio.com. Reach Georgina Woudstra on LinkedIn. She'd love to hear from you and especially if you want to know more about team coaching and have an emergent experience, which was predominantly what her article was about. So thanks again, uh, Georgina, for joining us for this Beyond the Page episode.

Georgina Woudstra:

Thank you for having me. I look forward to meeting your readers soon.

Garry Schleifer:

Well, if they've met you, so who knows? That's it for this episode of Beyond the Page. For more episodes, subscribe via your favorite podcast app, most likely the one that got you here. If you're not a subscriber to choice Magazine and you're watching this video, you can sign up for your free digital issue by scanning the QR code in the top right corner of our screen. If you're listening in listening mode, go to choice-Online.com and click the sign up now button. I'm Garry Schleifer. Enjoy the journey of mastery.