Watching the way good youth coaches interact with children boils down to some very commonsense rules that extend to nearly every walk of life. For the most part, coaches are leaders in the same way that military officers, corporate managers and even heads of household are.
These lessons become even more apparent when you see people who are not following these best practices. The contrast between good and bad coaches is stark.
So, here are the lessons that come to mind:
1. People will do anything to avoid being yelled at. The results are, at best, short-lived. Doing this can ultimately be counterproductive to the organization's goals.
Adults know this. There was a time when raised voices were probably more common in the work environment, but that day has passed. Not only was it rude and inconsiderate to yell at employees, but ultimately, in the end, it was counterproductive.
Most people simply become resentful. There's also a substantial risk that by focusing on avoiding being yelled at, that a person will lose focus on the tasks they should be most focused on.
When I see successful coaches, they raise their voices a lot. They especially raise them when giving praise. They raise them because they have to be heard over long distances. However, generally speaking, the days of a coach dressing-down a player on the sideline are gone.
Youth sports has progressed quite a bit, too. Even during my day, virtually all coaches were positive and encouraging.
However, I still see coaches who think they're modern day Vince Lombardis who are yelling at kids who are still in elementary school.
The environment you want to create is one where players are relaxed, focused and playing with all their senses active. Yelling at them motivates them by fear. There are very few complex tasks in life that you can do well while fearful.
2. The bulk of all communication needs to be positive. I've heard a rule of thumb that I firmly believe, that in a good relationship, there are generally at least 5 positive comments for every 1 negative one. For instance, "hey, I notice you got a C on this spelling test" carries a lot of weight if it was preceeded by five comments like, "I'm really proud of you, son", or "I like how you're working hard on your homework."
A relationship of any kind where a person is receiving mostly negative feedback isn't an example of leadership. It's an example of nagging. Those types of relationships are awful for everyone involved. The person being nagged wants out the minute they can get out. The person doing the nagging is generally not very happy, either.
In baseball, there are SO many occassions to provide positive feedback: every ball that's fielded correctly, every ball that's thrown, every ball that's hit, every time a guy hustles to first base even if he gets thrown out.
A good coach, leader, officer, executive, parent should be cheerleader-in-chief of their organization. Ultimately, you want people to be DRAWN to positive behaviors. That happens through positive reinforcement. You don't want to merely PUSH them away from negative behaviors. That's all negative reinforcement can accomplish.
I read some good advice when my son was very young. "Catch them being good". Now, my son is very young and it's far too premature to roll out the "mission accomplished" parenting banner, but for the most part, I have tried to see things he's doing that are positive and comment on them.
When I think of the military leaders, executives, managers, coaches I've interacted with, my favorites have always been the ones who pumped their people up.
Those leaders got perhaps the most impressive title a leader can get. They were "motivational". That is, that they made people want to perform to their fullest.
3. Praise publicly, criticize privately. In sports, this one can be tricky, but for the most part, praise can be loud and public. Criticism? Needs to be handled carefully. If possible, criticism should be done one-on-one, out of earshot of others.
That's not always true in sports. It seems very common for a coach to say something when a player muffs a play in the field or has a bad at-bat. However, how productive is this? The kid knows he messed up. Is there some NEW information you're giving, or are you just using it as an opportunity to tell the kid how badly he did?
Some of the best coaching I've seen with my son's team comes when, for instance, a player has a bad at-bat. The coach doesn't yell at them at all. He waits until they're in the dugout and says, "Hey, come here Bobby. Let's talk about that at-bat..."
Mission accomplished. The player knows what they did wrong. The coach communicated it in a way that conveyed neither anger nor disapproval of the kid as a player. The comments were focused on specific actions. "I could see you start swinging the second the pitcher was releasing the ball. Pick up the ball out of his hand and see it, first."
The kid gets something to think about, but in a manner where he doesn't feel humiliated. He also realizes that specific actions are the issue. It's not that the coach thinks less of them as a player.
I've also seen coaches handle it in completely the opposite manner. I've seen coaches threaten players with being benched for looking at a called 3rd strike, for instance. Instead of using it as a chance to teach a player, I think all those kids are thinking is, "I've just been humiliated in front of my friends and the coach hates me."
Criticizing is never easy for anybody involved, but taking it private is a good first step to making sure the desired outcomes are the result. Taking it public increases the chance of resentment and that the person on the receiving end will miss the main point.
4. People can handle, at most, one boss.
This one is more directed towards parents than coaches, but when the game is on, that's the time to let the coach do his job. What parents see as helpful is often nothing of the sort. I've seen cases where the coach was trying to instruct a player on what to do, but had to try and out-shout a parent who is yelling the opposite instructions to a kid. On occassion, our coach has had to ask an overly exhuberant parent to please be quiet so he can coach the team.
We've even had cases where a parent was yelling at somebody else's kid trying to help them out!
From the perspective of the coach, this is an irritant that makes his job harder. However, from the perspective of a kid, good lord. I cannot imagine doing a difficult task like trying to hit a baseball with 2 or 3 or maybe 4 people yelling at me. Kids in sports need to be focused on the task at hand, not trying to please a handful of people all at once.
This one has huge carry-over into the work environment. I remember once we had a manager in another department who would come into my department and start giving tasks to my people. I tried at every turn to make it clear that we'd work with anybody, but that requests had to come through me. Not so much because of a power struggle, but because I didn't want my people to feel like they were being pulled towards different priorities by different people. I've also worked in jobs where I had one formal boss, but a couple of informal ones. That's a very unpleasant situation to be in.
Now, because some sports have a lot of activities and a lot of assistant coaches, sometimes players need to take direction from an assistant. That's fine, but it's imperative that the coach and assistants have coordinated their efforts. There's nothing worse for a kid than having one coach tell him to do one thing, but then to get dressed down by the other coach who didn't realize the kid was just following the directions the other coach gave him.
If you extend that to the work world, it's easy to see the problem. How would most people react if they had two bosses, one of them told the person to do X, and the other boss then criticized them for it?
5. Every good leader is also a teacher. Every good teacher has a plan and executes it.
Coaches aren't just there to fill out the lineup card and call plays. They're there to get the team ready for game-time. Especially in youth sports, there are dozens, maybe hundreds of things to be taught. For instance, if teaching competitive baseball to kids, you have to show them everything from the proper grip on a baseball to how to pop-up slide.
Coaches should take note of how many skills they want to teach, how many practices they have to work with, and have an agenda going into each practice.
Good teachers have a lesson plan for every day. Coaches should have the same thing for every practice. If the amount of things that need to be taught exceeds the amount of practices, then coaches should do what anybody with finite resource constraints should do: prioritize and hit the most important stuff.
Too often, it seems that coaches teach by identifying things kids did wrong, then correcting them, publicly. Yeah, the team learns, but wouldn't it have made more sense to have spent the same amount of time teaching it in a structured manner during practice, instead of waiting to see a kid to mess up?
Teaching by correcting is discouraging for people. It is also haphazard. Much better to identify the things you want done and train them in an orderly and predictable manner.
If you're not teaching, you're not leading. "Leadership" in the absence of teaching is simply administering.
6. You should teach the potential next position not just the current one. Especially early in a playing career or early in a professional career, a good leader looks for opportunities to round out an individual. Granted, when a person is in college, they probably play just one position on their team. The CFO of a company doesn't dabble in sales, either. Those are situations appropriate for a person who is far along in their career and has already attained a level of maturity and success.
However, when the kids are 10 years old, there's no telling whether that scrawny short kid is going to grow up to be a tall lanky kid. The short pudgy kid may grow up to be tall and powerful.
That entry-level programmer might be better suited to sales. It's important to groom people for potential career paths that may not be obvious right now.
So, it's important to resist the urge to pidgeon hole them early on. You need to give them room to grow. It keeps them engaged, it sometimes turns up a diamond in the rough. It also avoids pidgeonholing them too soon.
7. Behind closed doors, you need to encourage open discourse. But once on the field, it's one team, one vision, one plan.
This one is hard on many levels. All coaches should have an open door with their players to discuss anything. When the kids are very, very young, unfortunately, the coaches probably also need to take their parents concerns under consideration.
A kid or employee needs the ability to say things that aren't fit for public consumption. "I feel like I'm being taken for granted", or "I hate this job you're giving me. If I finish it up can I work on something I like better next?"
This is not to say that a leader needs to GRANT anything that's asked for. That's clearly untrue. However, people will shut down if they feel they're not being heard. A good leader will listen and then give insight as to why a decision is going one way, versus another.
People are sometimes insecure and can take various things as personal attacks. A good leader has to set that aside. Listen. Teach. Advise. Inform.
Once that conversation is over, though, the responsibility is on the player or employee. When that meeting ends and they're back in circulation, it's one team, one message, one vision. Whether the player likes it or not, the coach's decision is THE decision and the player needs to support it 100%.
Same with employees. The best managers I had would tolerate some very heated discussion and disagreement. However, once the discussion was over, they expected you to go out and put your oar in the water and pull in the same direction as everybody else.
With some of the worst leaders, disagreement wasn't tolerated. With the best leaders, disagreement was tolerated in the right venue. However, disloyalty or insubordination was not.
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