The job of a sports coach has evolved over the years, as the complexity of the game and the human beings playing it increases . Today’s coaches not only need to be experts in their sport (outer game), but they also need to be able to facilitate the personal development (inner game) of their staff and their athletes, along with leading and communicating effectively with the media.
Five-Point Leadership Matrix
The Coaching Room facilitates through a five-point leadership matrix that we hope one-day will be an integral part of development for all high-performance sports coaches.
- Self – This includes self-awareness, self-development, self-management, self-leadership, responsibility, resilience, and a desire to continuously develop and reinvent themselves and their approach.
- Others – Sports are all about polarities (win/lose, right/wrong, score/don’t score, selected/missed out…). Coaches need to be able to lead and influence through the quality of their relationships. This requires perspective, quality dialogue and integral conversations.
- 4Ps – Parenting, partnering, prescribing and processing are the 4 key roles coaches needs to step between with the people they are leading.
- 4 Quadrants – The quadrants include first, second, third, and fourth person perspective. Coaches need to lead their own state as well as the state of those around them. This means objectively leading the culture, actions, and behaviors of the team while also being able to lead system processes throughout the organisation itself.
- Feedback – Coaches must be able to provide and receive high quality, sensory based feedback and know the difference between feedback and feed forward.
Beyond Technical and Tactical
Sports coaches need to be able to go beyond the technical and tactical, into a developmental role where they can lead individuals holistically. Rather than focusing on being the expert that simply directs her players, a coach also needs to become a collaborative partner, facilitating ownership and self-responsibility. In this capacity, coaches can facilitate, empower, and embed responsibility within their players. Coaches need to be able to awaken the potential within a team so the athletes themselves can take ownership of the game they are playing.
Losing Effectively
The polarity of sports is mainly focused on the outcome of the game. Playing a game where there is only going to be either a winner or a loser sets up a polarity. All sports organisations want to win, but that doesn’t always happen. Since every team will face some losses, coaches need to be able to teach their players how to lose effectively. Losing effectively is about learning how to develop and grow from loss. This is the greatest developmental opportunity a player on a team has in high-performance sports. We coaches offer the NLP presupposition – there is no failure, only feedback.
Becoming an Effective Leader
From a personal perspective for the coaches, the process is about how they connect and communicate with their players. By learning to be more effective leaders, they can relate to the players with more clarity. This gives them the ability to hold and utilise moral authority.
As we learn more about the human psyche, we have a greater appreciation for the complexity of developmental stages. Coaches need to learn how to coach the human elements (such as learning styles, cognitive biases, identifying limiting beliefs and assumptions etc.) of their sport, not just the technical elements. All coaches need a developmental coach to teach them how to take their coaching to the next level beyond tactics.
Coaching the Entire Organization
The Coaching Room works with all elements of the sporting team, from the players and the coach, to the executive staff. We run leadership and communication workshops that help organisations understand what leadership entails and how it is changing. The executive team is faced with a multitude of tasks, including board management, coach management, player management, and player selection. All of these dynamics come into play when the team is on the field trying to win their games.
If a team is having a bad season, there may be additional pressure from the media. Coaches must manage through the dynamic of these pressures that flow down from the executive level. Maintaining balance despite the pressure can be done using the different perspectives identified in the Integral four quadrants model. This allows coaches to identify what is opinion versus fact. Once these differences are understood, coaches can focus on the facts, which is a critical element of leadership.
Self-Awareness
One of the most impactful changes that comes with learning to be a more effective leader and coach is self-awareness. Coaches become more aware of their language, especially the use of first and second person pronouns. There is an awareness of self and one’s reactions, called state management, which allows people to let go of unfinished business. There is a capacity to move from telling to inquiring, seeking first to understand other perspectives before making decisions. All of this awareness enables a coach to provide high-quality feedback that is sensory specific, making a linear distinction between person and behaviour.
Coaches Need Coaches
Players aren’t the only ones that need coaches. Coaches need coaches too. The Coaching Room offers a variety of training to help you take your coaching to the next level.
