The balance between exigency and dialogue

          Coaches are continuously exposed to social evaluation coming from different parties around the team they lead (Directive Board, Press, other coaches, relatives…) and even from the team itself.

As project leaders, we must have (and show) a solid confidence on what we do, in addition to a non-stop desire of optimizing all the material and human resources available, in order to be successful. These human resources may include our everyday work group, the technical staff and the players. And with all of them we will be sharing good and bad times along the journey.

However, before anything else (capacities, weaknesses or strengths), we need to consider the individual, the person behind the player or the staff member, and the challenges he/she comes with. We need to convince them, make them feel important and satisfied with what they do and with the individual and group benefits they will receive in exchange. If we can make this work, if they feel satisfied and relevant, they will perform better; the level of implication will raise and they will be 100% committed with the project. The person sustains the player: behind the facade and the attitude, there is a human being, and without him/her, without the game’s main characters, there is nothing.

Thus, we have the need, and almost the duty, of getting to know the people we work with, of being conscious of their necessities, their capacity of adaptation, their fears and worries. It may be essential to know people in depth in order to assess what can be requested from each individual at a certain point.

Knowing the people we cooperate with on a daily basis will help us achieve goals as a group and will facilitate the process when it comes to making each member feel important and committed with their work within the team. That confidence and satisfaction will allow us to be more exigent: this is easier if we pull all together.  Demanding and negotiating is not incompatible, quite the opposite. There is a balance, and it defines the different styles as a coach. We will surely be able to identify ourselves with one or these styles, or to assign coaches or teachers to each of these groups:

Conciliator coaches: Low level of exigency and very open to communication.

Things happen just because. We listen and talk to all the players; we always encourage them in all situations but our level of exigency is low. We don’t pay attention to detail and we are not able to get the team to train intensely; we are probably too lenient. With this attitude we perform poorly when faced to bad results, and it will be hard for us to request a bigger effort from the team when needed. We must be aware of the fact that, certain players, due to their personality traces, needs to be constantly “pressed”. When we decrease our level of exigency, their motivation decreases as well. If we have a few players of this kind in our team and we try to be “tolerant”, things won’t work, particularly in times of big challenges where a higher level of concentration, commitment, attention and constructiveness is needed.

Absent coaches: Low level of exigency and not open to communication.

In this scenario, if we don’t have a self-sufficient group and an outstanding team, if we are not able (or we don’t want to) listen, if our interest in communication is scarce and our ability to request high levels of performance to each member of the group is limited, we will not be ready to lead the team. Circumstances will force us to give up will pave the way for another coach to take over. Most likely, the results we will achieve with these low levels of communication and exigency will be substandard.

 Feudal coaches: High level of exigency and not open to communication.

Coaches who do not communicate with and listen to the work group, coaches who are capable of just following their own ideas, trying to enforce them without considering all relevant factors, may be successful on the short term. However, long term, they will find what is commonly known as “burned land”.

 Good players try to escape this form of leadership, because it does not allow them to grow their creative space and it doesn’t promote personal development. If players are told what to do and how to do it at all times, they won’t have the opportunity to evolve later on. They will serve the coach’s interests on the short term but they won’t really explore their actual potential.

Coaches-Developers: High level of exigency and very open to communication.

Good leaders listen to their players and co-workers; they are open to receiving messages and feedback regarding how the process of training and coaching is presented. Paying attention to what our team has to say doesn’t mean that they can do what they want, or that the level of exigency is lower, quite the opposite. We will be on the right track to win the team’s respect and, thus, to obtain the right to request their best. Players will be performing at a high level without even realizing it.

With this style, we let the player express himself, be creative and enjoy the process, because he/she feels part of it; the feeling of personal gratification will be intense. This type of coaches does not feel intimidated or uncomfortable with talented assistants; on the contrary, they usually surround themselves with co-workers who help them develop all their skills.

There are, probably, many elements and circumstances that influence us when leading a human group. These are mainly aspects related to our personality traces, our social intelligence and our social skills, together with our intuition, background and past experiences. Being conscious of the different leadership options and the way they impact our work group will help us shape our performance and become the coach we would like to be.

Training and Communicating

                 Coaches must face lots of situations that require efficient communication skills as well as the capacity to lead, and which have nothing to do with our knowledge, our technical skills, our “amazing” list of exercises or tasks or our “spotless” methodology.

 We are talking about very familiar situations such us: correcting our players on each training session fighting emotions, feelings and prejudices; communicating clearly and efficiently a key instruction during a time out on a hard-fought game; applying all required internal measures to correct a player’s improper behavior; facing the after game evaluation of a serious defeat or an important victory, or just talking about life.

Besides, as group managers or team leaders, we have the responsibility and the opportunity to optimize the use of the resources the group members contribute with; those members can be either players, staff members or any other people that somehow influence or participate, on a daily basis, on the leader’s task of managing human resources.

In this sense, we must have certain communication skills, and we must apply them correctly. These mechanisms include stance, facial and body expression, gestures, tone of voice and message, but also the communicative space the leader creates for each of the situations – formal or informal– where he or she interacts with the team.

Deficient communicative skills may have a negative impact on our capacity as leaders, even when our referential authority (knowledge, experience, successes and command of the game) is high.

The skills most commonly mentioned on the bibliography about leadership make reference to communication (what we convey at all times), technical background and education, experience, individual psychology and management of working groups. And with regard to the factors that can go so far as to influence leadership in sport, they stress the importance of:

–        Referential authority: experience, background, personality, past successes, etc.

–        Communicative and pedagogical skills: efficient feedbackmanagement, assertiveness, emotional intelligence, etc.

–        Commitment with the tasks and also with people: search for the higher standards of individual and group development, contributing, motivating and generating a high level of satisfaction on the other team members.

–        Adaptability to context/situation: players profiles, positive and negative results, parents, press, referees, board, etc.

Our particular training methodology may be influenced by numerous factors, such as our personality features, past experiences, knowledge of the game and education, or the impact exercised by other coaches or people we have worked with during our career.

All this will shape our leadership style, mostly defined by three essential aspects: our implication in the development plan of the training sessions and games, the way we manage personal relationships with the rest of the team members and our decision making style.

It seems that all these factors outline two different ways of connecting and communicating with the team; these would be the ends of a continuum, of a scale where we all fit and place ourselves in our everyday activities: IMPOSITION and TRANSACTION.

On one of these extremes are the coaches that usually turn to impositions, demands and, if needed, punishment, and who most often sanction errors or bad results. On the other extreme, we can find the coaches who base their style on transaction and active listening, controlling all tasks and playing an evident role in personal relationships, trying to find middle ground for understanding. This type of coach tends to convince instead of to enforce, and has the capacity to delegate tasks to the other members of his staff.

This has nothing to do with having authority or not; both types of coaches may have it, since authority is related to the capacity of decision making. But a leader who “imposes” by force is poorly wasting his authority. In those cases, we usually communicate with players by keeping a physical (and hierarchical) distance, supported by an aggressive body language with despotic, domineering stances and gestures. With this “unfriendly” behavior, we have a poor communicative production and interact less with our players by reducing dialog and increasing the amount of orders that we transmit.

Each style has its pros and cons and, as we explained before, each of us has his own spot in that continuum defined by these two remote profiles.

It seems obvious that a coach that is more prone to transaction is usually a self-confident coach, one that accepts the challenge of talking, because he has enough arguments and doesn’t need to protect himself wasting his authority.

A coach who feels insecure and threaten by the results, the press, the team or the relationships with staff or board members, activates the mechanisms to protect his authority, usually through imposition, punishment and separation. That’s when he may end up detaching himself from the group, thus losing his leadership.

Likewise, when a coach feels confident he doesn’t sense his authority as being threatened by the group; he doesn’t need to squander his power to protect himself or to defend his role.

There are no studies that prove a style to be more efficient than the other when it comes to winning, being successful or achieving good results. There are successful coaches out there that are, at the same time, authoritarian, uncommunicative and inflexible; it may have nothing to do with self-confidence: they simply feel comfortable with that particular style.

It would be ideal to have the right skills to adapt ourselves to every scenario, with a situational leadership that allowed us to perfectly manage each of these situations. We should probably learn how to take the right preventive measures against our communicative reactions to each of those unpredicted or predictable challenges.

Sometimes we act on our intuition and experience about situations that are familiar to us. Both intuition and experience are conditioned by our balance of successes/defeats in the past.

We, as coaches, are communicators. Our emotional reactions may play a dirty trick on us and lead us to the wrong communicative reaction; we may then provide a hesitant, incoherent or vague message,  accompanied by a particular body language that we would have preferred to avoid in that specific situation. That’s when self-control and emotional intelligence come to play an important role regarding interaction with the team.

Something we must be clear about is that, even when we are not talking, WE ARE ALWAYS COMMUNICATING: Communicating is not just about speaking; it is a non-automatic process between two or more individuals.