What do you believe? What’s important to you? What do you value? Those are all questions that go into creating your own personal coaching philosophy. I’ve gone through Franklin Covey courses where we’re asked to create our own mission statement and I’ve gone to coaching clinics that ask us to formulate our coaching philosophy. So when I saw this article over at the Harvard Business Review’s (HBR) blog, I thought it would be interesting to share with you guys. It talks about creating a mission statement in eight words or less, so I figured I’d accept the challenge. Let’s see what an 8-word coaching philosophy would look like.
First I wanted to show you what a mission statement I’d written a couple of years ago looked like:
I will inspire my team to excel and be successful through my example as a leader. I promise to be available to them and to support them to the best of my abilities.
That’s a lot more than eight words…thirty three to be exact. And I feel like that was whittled down from a longer version after a whole mission statement writing “experience”! But it definitely represents the things that are important to me as a coach. That’s my personal coaching philosophy…it’s not something that I chat about with my team. Which turns out to be good, because the HBR article says that most mission statements are “forgotten by, misremembered, or flatly ignored by frontline employees.”
That’s why the guy highlighted in the article has the companies he works with come up with a mission statement that’s under eight words. They also must follow this format: Verb, target, outcome…like: “Save endangered species from extinction”. So what would yours look like if you had to say it concisely?
Here’s a few for me:
- Work hard, have fun. (This is actually the one I use for my team and with recruits)
- Prepare players to achieve.
- Lead them, teach them, love them.
- Preparing athletes for success.
- Creating leaders one athlete at a time.
It’s not as easy as it sounds! You should sit down and think about your coaching philosophy and how to get it under eight words…then you can email me and let me know how it went!
