Bo Hanson understands that a coach-player relationship is a two-way street. It’s not enough for the coaches to get to know their athletes, they must be open to allow the players to get to know them as well.

As a four-time Australian Olympic rower and coaching consultant, Hanson started Athlete Assessments, a company whose mission is to help drive performance through people.

Hanson believes that building relationships is something that coaches need to be intentional about.

“We know when a program is serious about this when they start to allocate what would normally be physical conditioning time or practice time towards ‘Hey, let’s talk about each other now, let’s have a chat about what we know about one another’,” Hanson said. “It comes down to those little conversations.”

Hanson recognizes that people have an inbuilt need to be cared for and to want to belong to something. The more that that kind of environment is created, the more that athletes are going to buy into the coach.

“Your true competitive vibe rests in how you manage and relate to and develop relationships with your athletes,” said Hanson, a recent guest on the USA Football Coach and Coordinator podcast.

Therefore, coaches need to recognize that relationships are critical to a team and that understanding each other can lead to success on and off the field.

“We’ve had teams that have been successful. Yeah, they do all the physical stuff, that’s a given, that’s the ticket to the event,” Hanson said. “But then they spend as much time as they can going to dinner together, catching up on the weekend, doing some team development activities outside of sport. It’s the simple things.”

In Hanson’s eyes, if a coach only knows how an athlete behaves in the context of the sport, then the coach doesn’t really know the athlete at all. And vice versa.

“If they turn up to practice and then leave straight after, where is the time to develop a relationship?” Hanson said. “Relationships really start to develop when you start to understand somebody outside of the context that you’re participating them in.”

Both coaches and players need to allow time for relationships to develop, which means asking questions, hanging out outside of practice, and giving each other the opportunity to understand who they are as a person, not just as an athlete or coach.

It’s critical for coaches to not only spend time learning about their players, but also to share a bit about themselves—something that may be outside of some coaches’ comfort zones.

“A lot of coach’s conversations are pretty one way and finding out about the player,” Hanson said. “But that’s not what a relationship is. A high-quality relationship is based on the concept of reciprocity, which is ‘Hey, I tell you something about me and you tell me something about you.’ It’s having a philosophy that this is important. The depth of knowing someone increases when you do those things.”