I’ve talked before about the connection I see between the business world and athletics. I think we’d all do well to study up on great business leaders to see how we can adapt their success to our world. Saying that, here’s a podcast from Harvard Business Review’s blog, called How Effective Leaders Talk.
After studying and interviewing tons of hot shot leaders, they came up with four ways that effective leaders engage their employees…which I thought would be great for us. Whether we’re just working with our athletes or are in charge of an entire staff of folks…engagement is always the goal! Why is engagement so important? As they said in the podcast, “And the more engaged they are, the more productive they’re going to be.”
4 ways to engage our athletes
- Intimate. You guys know how much I love John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success, right? Well, the foundation of his Pyramid has loyalty, cooperation, and friendship as its components…doing those things should make a team pretty intimate. Effective and engaged teams are close with one another…and their coaches.
- Interactive. Of course, we’re the coaches and we’re not running a democracy and ultimately what we say goes. But, our teams should know and truly believe they can talk to us and actually have us listen to what they say. That doesn’t mean we’ll do what they want us to, but being heard goes a long way with creating engagement.
- Inclusive. Does everyone on your team enjoy their experience? Even your newbies? Or is your culture so bogged down in making the new folk’s lives miserable that they can’t settle down and enjoy the sport? Inclusion is a top-down endeavor. If we, as coaches, make it clear that we don’t tier our athletes, then they won’t do it either.
- Intentional. It’s hard for coaches to have intimate conversations with everyone on the team all of the time. But there are some ways we can be more intentional about it. Individual meetings are good. Setting up a system where you check in with a few people to check on the health of the whole team. Engaging those quiet folks on our teams will always be a challenge. They usually have good stuff to say, but we’ve got to draw it out of them.
A lot of the “old school” ways of coaching destroy rather than build engagement. Today’s coaches have to coach this new breed of athletes a little bit differently. These four steps should get us closer to our ideal.
