If you’re like me, you’re always on the lookout for ways to understand team development.  Jeff Janssen does a good job explaining the stages in his Championship Team Building book and I enjoyed the S-Curve Trend of Team Development from a team building blog called, Create Learning. I believe that winning and losing hinge on team development, which makes it a critical piece to any coach’s season planning.  Team development is as much art as it is science and I’m sure we’re all looking for fresh ideas to tackle an on-going issue.

The four stages that teams go through

• Infancy.  This is when our teams are developing an orientation toward one another, feeling each other out.  During infancy, trust is established and each person is trying to figure out where they fit in relation to the team.  For coaches, the focus isn’t necessarily on performance, but making sure everyone has a role and understands how to execute it.
• Growth.  This stage is a time of high productivity.  Goals are clear and everyone on the team is committed to achieving those goals.  For coaches, the focus is on increasing team chemistry and synergy.  Synergy is when a group of two or more folks get together to achieve a goal that they wouldn’t be able to accomplish solo.
• Maturity.  This is when our team’s attention is on sustaining the high productivity from the growth phase.  Maintaining a high level of team output is the key to maturity.  For coaches, this is the time we should start thinking about preparing for the next s-curve to begin.
• Decline.  While the word “decline” sounds bad, it’s really a time for assessment.  What worked and what didn’t?  Should you have a player switch positions? What could the coaching staff have done better?  Was the team properly prepared for success?  Should we build a season plan similar to this one or scrap it and start new?
• (Bonus) Secondary s-curve:  Then the team starts up again the next season…now armed with the knowledge they’ve accumulated from previous years.  In theory, each s-curve should be higher than the last as your team grows together.  That’s why, more times than not, a team of seniors will experience more success than a team of freshman.

I think it’s interesting to look at these kinds of things as we think critically about our teams, our seasons, and how we’ll prepare for success.

Writing a post about how kids shouldn’t specialize in a particular sport when they’re too young may seem a bit disingenuous for me.  After all, as a college coach, I directly benefit from our culture’s obsession with organized youth sports.  In my opinion, most kids in youth sports aren’t playing because they have a deep and lasting love of their particular sport, but because their friends play and their parents make them go. Sport should be fun for even the most highly skilled young athletes.

Beyond fun, parents and coaches should encourage youth athletes to play all sorts of sports so that their bodies can rest.  Young kids can play volleyball in the fall, soccer in the winter, and run track in the spring.  They’re still working out and being healthy, but not overtaxing the same muscle groups by playing the same sport year-round.  You can read more about this by reading Dr. Geier’s blog post, How Young Is Too Young?.

So what makes kids decide to quit playing?

They’ve lost interest.  After a year of playing, maybe your eight-year-old realizes that soccer isn’t as great as she thought it would be…that’s probably okay.

They’re not having fun.  Even for my college athletes, I think fun is important.  We play games, not works, sport should be fun.

They’re tired of playing.  Think about the youth sport carousel: practice a couple of times a week after school, get up early on Saturdays and Sundays to play in tournaments…it can be a grind.  I always wonder how the parents balance it all, maybe it would be a similarly good question to wonder how the kids manage it.

There’s too much emphasis on winning.  While I believe in the value of teaching winning and losing with grace, if the coach or parent is just focused on winning (at all costs), I’m sure it can be taxing on the kid.  I certainly don’t think everyone should get a trophy at the end of the day, but we’ve got to teach the children that there are winners beyond what the scoreboard shows.

They want to participate in other activities.  Hopefully we want to create well-rounded children who play basketball and lacrosse…but who are also artists and singers and members of the orchestra.  Participation in sports shouldn’t exclude our children from loving other things.

They feel too much pressure.  It’s probably the coach in me saying this, but pressure from the moment (needing to hit a free throw shot to win the game) is a great life lesson.  Pressure from their mom and dad in the car on the way home as they dissect every moment of the game is probably not the best.

Of course, there may come a time for middle or high school aged kids to focus on a particular sport, but there’s no need to rush it.  Ultimately, we all want kids to love sports.  We believe that sports are great for many reasons, let’s make sure we don’t steal the love of the game away from our kids.

If you liked this post, check out Y Is For Youth Sports: 5 Reasons Kids Should Play Sports, 4 Reasons Our Children Should Play Sports (Or My Love Letter To Athletics), and 3 Reasons Why Sports Are Awesome.

Did you know that there are twenty leadership qualities common to most organizations?  Neither did I, that’s probably why I found this article very interesting.  As we think of coaches we admire or players we’ve coached that have inspired us…it’s sometimes hard to put their leadership traits into words.  This list is designed to give us words for what we know intuitively about great leaders.

20 leadership traits common to virtually all groups

____ Ambitious:  Having a strong desire and determination to succeed.
____ Broad-minded: Open-minded to and tolerant of differing opinions and suggestions.
____ Caring: Compassionate and concerned with maintaining quality relationships.
____ Competent: Having the required knowledge or skill to perform a task successfully.
____ Cooperative: A team player who is interested in working toward the team’s common goal.
____ Courageous: Bold, daring, fearless, gutsy, brave.
____ Dependable: Reliable and trustworthy, someone the team can count on.
____ Determined: Not afraid to make a tough decision and willing to stand by it.
____ Fair-minded: Someone who is impartial and just.
____ Forward-looking: Someone who is up on the latest trends, ahead of the game, a visionary.
____ Honest: A trustworthy and sincere person.
____ Imaginative: A curious and creative person.
____ Independent:  A self-reliant person who doesn’t depend on others to make decisions.
____ Inspiring: This person can uplift the group with their positive energy.
____ Intelligent: A reflective and thoughtful person who uses sound judgment.
____ Loyal: Someone who is unswerving in their allegiance to the team and the program.
____ Mature: A wise person with a depth of experience.
____ Self-controlled: Self-disciplined and restrained, able to control one’s actions and emotions.
____ Straightforward: Honest and direct, you’ll know where you’re standing with this person.
____ Supportive: A natural comforter, this person willingly provides encouragement.

Different ways to use this list:

• Self-assessment of leadership skills,
• Pre & post leadership training for team leaders/captains,
• Ask team to put qualities in order of importance regarding captains,
• Ask team to put qualities in order of importance regarding coaching staff,
• Ask each team member to pick their favorite from the list and explain their reasoning to the group,
• Pick seven words that describe yourself,
• Pick seven words that describe your ideal leader.

Challenge yourself

• Pick the five qualities you believe are your personal best from the list.
• Pick the five qualities you would like your team leaders to master.

I’ll step out on a limb for this one.  My five:  I am ambitious, competent, determined, honest, and self-controlled.  (This is tougher than it looks!  All of these traits are great, so it’s hard to choose.  As I go through the list, I feel as if I’m making judgments on the validity of the other traits, which certainly isn’t true.)  My top five for team leaders:  ambitious, broad-minded, cooperative, courageous, and inspiring.  Give it a try and see what you think.

This could be a great tool for coaches to use with their staffs…to see how they complement one another as well as with your team captains/leaders.  It seems that finding all of these traits in one person would be difficult to impossible…but it could definitely happen with a group of people.

It could be a losing season.  Or an injury to your star player.  Or the death/sickness of a player or someone close to the team.  Or a player with an eating disorder.  Whatever the adversity your team is facing, we’ve got to know how to get ourselves, as well as our teams, through it with minimal damage.

11 ways to stay awesome when things don’t go according to plan

1. Ask for advice.  Hopefully we can find someone who has gone through what we’re going through and they can tell us how they handled their adversity.  Hearing other folks talk about a similar situation is good for brainstorming, but it also lets folks know they can approach us about whatever bad situation is going on with our team.
2. Reframe it as a challenge.  Adversity is real…but it’s also how we approach it.  If we tell ourselves that this is the worst thing ever and our team will never overcome this obstacle, then we’ll be pretty down about our situation.  If we tell ourselves that it’s not that big of a deal, then we may not be living in reality.  I think a good response to adversity is somewhere in the middle.  Accept the challenge, figure out how to learn/grow from it, and don’t let it beat you.
3. Tell your success story in advance.  Think about a year from now when we’re well past our adverse situation…whatever that may be.  Think about how awesome it’s going to feel to tell people about how down we and our teams were and how we managed to grab victory from defeat.  Thinking about the inevitable success we’ll experience is invaluable in making it through the muck of a challenging situation.
4. This is a necessary part of your story.  Success generally doesn’t happen in a straight line.  It ebbs and flows, with peaks and valleys.  So we can see this adversity as just a normal and necessary part of our story.  The bummer of a yin to the amazing yang that is bound to happen.
5. Refuse to whine.  Just like we don’t let our teams wallow in feeling badly for themselves after they’ve played poorly, we can’t let situations turn us into the person everyone runs from in the office.  It’s okay to feel sorry for ourselves momentarily, but if it becomes central to who we are…something’s got to change!
6. Be lucky.  Are unlucky people really unlucky or just finding what they’re looking for?  I’ve been around some Negative Nelsons who make a living out of finding the negative in any situation.  I can guarantee those folks aren’t lucky…at least not the good kind.  Lucky folks don’t waste their energy being negative, but search out positivity.  Positive folks make their own luck.
7. Seek out positivity.  It could be an author we like or chatting with your pastor or going to church or working out…whatever it is, make sure it lifts you up.  When your team is in the dumps, the last thing you need is to make it worse by reading/watching/listening to negative things.
8. Don’t beat yourself up.  If our situation is a losing season, it doesn’t mean that we’re the world’s worst coach.  If it’s a player injury, it doesn’t mean that we did anything wrong in practice or game preparation that make them get hurt.  Bad things happen and it’s not always our fault.  And even if it is, learn from it and move on.
9. Realize you’re not the first or last.  This one is huge!  Just because it’s our first go ‘round with this particular challenge, doesn’t mean no one has experienced it before.  Like we talked about in number one, go out and find advice from people who’ve been there and done that.
10. Get perspective.  It may seem morbid, but things can always be worse.  In the grand scheme of life, how bad is our problem really?
11. Help someone else.  Helping others is a catch-all feel good.  Volunteer at a soup kitchen to get some perspective (see #10) or help a friend move.  Not only is it a good thing, but it’ll get our minds off of whatever challenges our teams are facing.

The inspiration for this article came from a business blog post called, “34 Ways to Stay Awesome When Things Suck”.  Check it out, though there’s some saucy language…you’ve been warned.

If you liked this post, maybe you’d like these, too:  5 Questions That Can Prevent Tragedy From Attacking Your Team, The 4 Most Important Steps Required to Guide Your Team Through Crisis, and Losing Is Lonely: Encouraging Yourself In Tough Times.

I’m sure we’ve all heard those crazy stories about what stars demand for appearances.  Here’s a few of them:

• Apparently singer Barbara Streisand asks for peach colored toilet paper because it matches her skin;
• Mariah Carey asks for a new toilet seat to be installed in all of her hotel rooms;
• I guess Beyonce asks for her room to be exactly seventy eight degrees.

There are lots more on this site and I certainly don’t know if they’re true or not, but that’s not the point.  The point is demanding attention to detail from the people around us…most importantly our teams.  I always thought celebrities were being prima donnas by asking all of this stuff, but it turns out there’s more to it.

In his post, No Brown M&M’s! David Lee Roth and the Power of Checklists, Tim Ferris gives us some insight into why celebrities sometimes make eccentric demands.  Stars give their hosts a checklist of hundreds of things, ninety nine percent of which is vital to making their appearance successful.  The one percent of eccentricity is designed to find out whether their host actually read the checklist and followed through.  For David Lee Roth, having brown m & m’s in his room meant there could be other, potentially life-threatening, mistakes on the horizon…so a full inventory of the checklist had to be completed.

So how does this apply to us as coaches?  Think about the long checklist of duties we have for our players:

• Work hard
• Give 100% effort
• Support your teammates
• Lift weights
• Go to the training room
• Come early
• Stay late
• Hang out together outside of practice
• Get good grades
• Compete for your position
• Be a good leader
• Be a good follower
• Workout over the summer
• And the list goes on and on!

Surely, we believe that all of these things (and more) are important and essential for our teams to thrive.  It’s a lot for one person to remember, now think about what we have to do:  manage these expectations for ten to twenty players!

So what am I suggesting?  Most importantly, that our players need to know (and see) what our expectations of them are…maybe put them in the team handbook.  It’s much harder to miss the mark when they know where the target is.

The idea behind all of this isn’t to drive our players crazy, but to hold them accountable.

Can you think of accountability tactics coaches could use with their players?  What would our “brown M & M’s” be?  Hit me up on Twitter if you come up with any ideas!

Cultivating leaders has been on my mind lately.  I’m trying to make sure that I do my best to create the best and most amazing leaders that I possibly can…I want my athletes to be rock stars!

What does an awesome leader look like?  According to this post, great leaders follow their values, are confident in crisis, and are well connected on the team.

During the course of a normal season, with its ups and downs, every team requires a leader who can handle crisis.  Check out the different ways leaders can help or hurt when your team is going through a tough time.

As we talk to our teams about picking captains or recognizing leadership traits in one another, this would be great information to give them.

I follow a lot of business magazines on Twitter, so when the headline “What It Takes To Win” appeared on my timeline, I knew I was going to bring it over here.  This is what all coaches are trying to figure out, right?  Rather than an article, it’s actually a series of five short videos interviewing Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks.  I’d say he knows a thing or two about being successful against fierce competition!

Many times in my gym, we say that winning is an outcome, not part of the process…and if we control the process, we can reasonably assume that the outcome will be positive in our favor.   So we don’t talk “winning” necessarily, but there are steps we can take to ensure we’ve done our best to control the process.

3 important attitudes teams need in order to create a winning culture

Culture creation  Schultz said two things about creating culture that stuck out to me…and that I think are linked.  First, those people who are willing to get their hands dirty will succeed.  What does that mean?  It means the team is “all in”.  Is everyone on our team giving it their all?  Sometimes players will hold back because they don’t think they’re an important piece of the team or because they’re new to the team.  When everyone is willing to go all out every day in practice, our odds of winning increase.  Second, everyone needs a stake in what it takes to win.  That way, no one’s to blame when things go wrong, but more importantly, no one can gloat when things work out the way we’re hoping.  It levels the playing field.

Great team chemistry  If you’ve been reading for a while or you’ve seen me speak, you know that I believe that sport is about way more than skills and drills and games…it’s about the intangibles we use each and every day!  Sport is just the Trojan horse for creating amazing human beings.  Schultz says that unbridled enthusiasm and passion are essential for great team chemistry.  Of course, this is part of the great culture that we’ll create of players who are willing to get their hands dirty.  An enthusiasm for practicing, for getting better, for working hard, for pushing each other, for excelling, for never giving up, for supporting one another…that’s what will give our team’s great chemistry.

Make bold moves   As Robert Frost said, “I took the road less traveled, and that has made all the difference.”  Winning may mean we have to swim upstream and do things a little differently.  A great line from the video is that great leaders must be able to see what’s around the corner.  Maybe you see that your team’s leadership is in its younger classes…how will you handle that while maintaining your team chemistry?  Maybe you think a player should switch positions, but you don’t think she’ll be all that fired up about it…how will you sell it to her?  There are so many situations that require the coach’s forethought…will we be ready?  One word of caution, whenever we do things that are outside of the box, people will think we’re doomed to fail.  Making bold moves means we must have the courage of our convictions and do what we think is best for the team.

So, here we are!  We’ve got the steps mapped out for creating a winning culture: Everyone on the team needs a stake in its success or failure, passion for the team and how the team plays is critical, and a willingness to make bold moves and do things differently.

This post from the Harvard Business Review’s blog is spot on, you should read it.  In The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time, the author talks about multitasking and why it really doesn’t work.

Consequences of multitasking
I’m a to-do list kind of lady, it helps me stay focused.  There are times when I can’t help but to get side-tracked from checking things off of my list.  Players may drop in the office, or my boss may pop in to chat about something, or an email may chime in demanding immediate attention.  But most times, I can script my day and I try to get as much done (I thing at a time) as I can.  Without my to-do list, I think I’d fall prey to multitasking.  Here are some downsides:

• We become partially engaged in multiple things, but rarely fully engaged in one.
• We increase our time to finish each task by 25%.
• In a word: burnout.

I wrote about it in You Think You Can But You Can’t: On The Evils Of Multitasking if you’d like to see more info.

Changing group expectations
Part of society’s multitasking problem is it has become built in to our culture.  I get work emails and texts at nine, ten, or eleven o’clock at night.  Of course, I choose to look at my phone to check them…but why are they even being sent?  In my post, Step Away From The Computer: Why Unplugging Will Keep You Sane, I talk about creating time for ourselves by creating electronics-free time.  Here are three ways that we can help our teams understand the beauty of doing one thing at a time:

• Maintain practice discipline.  We’ve got to show our players that they can be focused for an extended period of time…and not resort to their crutch phones to entertain them.
• Stop expecting immediate responses.  I’m sure I’m not the only one who gets annoyed if I send an email or text and don’t hear back right away.  As if everyone in the world is sitting around staring at their computer or phone waiting to hear from me.  Not only is this attitude selfish, it’s a little arrogant as well.
• Encourage rest.  Talking to our players about the benefit of resting, of really doing nothing should be something we deem important.  Physical, as well as mental, rest is essential for balance.

Changing personal expectations
How can we adjust our personal expectations so that we can find balance in our lives?  I wrote a post called, Take These 3 Steps To Become A More Effective Leader, based on a great article from The American Scholar called, Solitude and Leadership.  You should check it out, because it talks about how to counter this attitude that we always have to be “on”.  Here are three things we can do to change our personal mindsets about multitasking:

• Do the most important stuff in the morning.  It’s funny, everyone here at work says the same thing:  I get more work done in the morning before everyone else gets into the office.  What if we planned our days in that manner?  We could close our office doors for an hour or so and be super productive.
• Schedule strategic/creative time.  This way we’re not always reacting to situations, but being proactive.  I’m a big fan of assessing my seasons…I can’t do that if I’m always running around like my pants are on fire.
• Take real vacations.  Going to Spain, but constantly checking your work email and texts doesn’t count.  A real vacation could be taking a week off to tend to your garden and not worrying about work stuff.

Full disclosure, I couldn’t even get through writing this post without checking my phone. As organized as I am, I can still be distracted by the various beeps and chimes of my phone.  How much quicker would we finish our to-do lists if we didn’t let outside things grab our attention?  I don’t know about you, but I’d like to find out.

Click here and you can get Coach Dawn Writes articles emailed directly to your inbox!  It’s free and easy…and I won’t give your email to anyone else.  Scouts honor.

“The thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works.  That’s it.  And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else.  They work much, much harder.” –Outliers

The tagline of Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell is: The Story of Success.  I think that’s a topic of interest to most folks and coaches in particular.  I’ve got a story about a teammate of mine who is the definition of the opening quotation.

My teammate, let’s call her Susie, was an all-American at the University of Wisconsin, which was a top twenty-five team at the time.  She was the best, most skilled, and hardest working player that I knew.  She had aspirations beyond collegiate volleyball…Susie wanted to represent our country in the Olympics.  She talked to one of our assistant coaches who’d played on the national team about what she should do…and the coach told her to work harder.

I’m telling you, Susie was already the hardest working player on a nationally ranked team!  She was our best player, she was the undisputed leader, she was a baller.  But if she wanted to move to the next level, Susie needed to work harder.

And if we want to be better, we’ve got to work harder as well.  And so do our athletes.

The rundown:  Like Daniel Coyle talked about in The Talent Code, Gladwell identifies ten thousand hours as the magic number for success.  It’s not just ten thousand hours of casual practice…but motivated, focused, persistent practice.  We’ve probably all coached the athlete who gives up about twenty seconds after we’ve tried to teach her a new skill.  We’ve got to let her know that “success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.”

Recommended for:  Coaches who want to get better and who want their athletes to get better.  I believe we all want to put ourselves and our players in the best position to excel and reach our highest potential.  This book will motivate us all to put in the work necessary to never have regrets about our achievement level.

Not recommended for:  Coaches who believe that hard work is all it takes to be successful.  While Gladwell talks about the ten thousand hour rule, he also mentions things that are out of our control that influence success.  Things like the month and year we’re born, the era in which we’re born (if I were a woman fired up about coaching a hundred years ago, I’d be out of luck), affluence or lack thereof, etc.

So, Susie didn’t make the Olympic team.  As I think back, I wonder what would have happened if she’d stuck with it, because she was almost at her ten thousand hours.  Gladwell says that it takes about ten years to reach that threshold…Susie stopped playing in year eight.  We didn’t know about this kind of stuff back then.

But we do now…let’s make sure we’re using the information that’s available to us.

If you love to read books, keep checking back as I talk about three books that are great for coaches, but not made for coaches:  The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, How to Grow Leaders by John Adair, and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.

Whenever someone asks me about a great leadership book, I recommend this one…with a slight hesitation.  The author, John Adair, is quite proud of himself.  So, if you can get past how often he tells you he’s awesome…you’ll love it!  It’s full of great information.  I’ve already written three posts (linked at the end) about the book and I could easily write three more.

The rundown:  You have to get to the middle of How to Grow Leaders before the author talks about the actual growing of leaders:

• Select good seed:  Choose natural leaders.
• Prepare the soil: Does our team culture promote leadership growth?
• Enrich the earth by fertilizing and watering: Coaches have to invest in leadership training to yield good leaders.
• Rotate the crops:  Give your leaders multiple opportunities to lead and see where they thrive.
• Let the fields lie fallow:  Just like real crops, leaders need time to rest so that they can continue to be fruitful.
• Observe where plants thrive:  If we’ve got a few strong leaders, each of them will probably have a different area of strength…we can increase their success by just being more aware.
• Prune the dead wood:  What worked with one leader may not work with another.  Pruning our leaders means getting rid of things that aren’t working.
• Let the taproots go deep:  Dandelions have deep roots…which is why they keep coming back year after year.  We want our leaders to be consistent and reliable like those dandelions.

Recommended for:  Any coach who’s interested in leadership and leadership training.  There’s enough information here for three or four books.  I highly recommend it…with the caveat I mentioned before.  He’s got lots of lists, which make for easy reading.  He’s also got more in depth material with historical perspectives on leadership.

Not recommended for:  Coaches without a significant amount of time to digest the information.  This book is a meal, not an appetizer, so it requires time.

If you’re interested in reading more of what I’ve got to say about John Adair’s book, read: 7 Qualities Every Leader Must Have, The 3 Levels Of Leadership, and Create Effective Leaders Using This 5 Step Process.

If you love to read books, keep checking back as I talk about three books that are great for coaches, but not made for coaches:  The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, How to Grow Leaders by John Adair, and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.