6. Group Work & Management
If you’ve spent any time in a gym, a classroom, of around people and need to get something done, you’ve probably had to split up into teams somehow. You’ve also probably had the “whoops, those two definitely shouldn’t be together”1 moment in a session where you’ve set up teams for a task or drill.
Groups
We got to reflect on why we split people into groups, when we should, and how. Rather than just falling back on our old favorites, we got to think a bit about conscious decisions that might make the task more meaningful.
Some of my old favorites for determining groups are:
Number everybody for however many groups I need and send them off to their groups.
Sometimes this one results in loads of people maneuvering around the hall, trying to get in place to be on a team with their friends as I ‘duck, duck, goose’ it around trying to assign out numbers
Have them self-organize and point to spots in the room or on the court and say how many I need in each area
This one also has a tendency to be a little lop-sided if there are too many cliques
Select captains for each group I need and have them select the teams, order determined by Rock, Paper, Scissors
This one can result in tears, of course, no one really wants to be picked last, but hey, sometimes it’s appropriate
Pre-select the groups based on ability for the task
Usually I don’t get too much griping from this one, but I have had to recalibrate, mid-session, if I didn’t balance them well enough
Assign numbers at the start of the session, especially for tryouts, take pictures for tying the participant back to the notes later, and then use the numbers to divide up groups
Use a game to divide, something like Queen/King of the Court style, or Bjerring tournaments, where people can be distributed based on the number of points to either weight it evenly or group similar numbers together
And what Jim had us thinking about was the social and task cohesion… are these folks going to get on with one another, are they going to cooperate to achieve the group’s goals?
Of course, he’d been using these strategies throughout the weekend, any time we had to split up to perform a task in groups. For the first task, we found our groups by referring to a sheet with obscure facts about each participant on it2, and the corresponding letter or numbers matched up as a group. You had to talk to the others about their background to figure out who was who, so it was a great icebreaker, as well as team builder. In other instances we had a minor word puzzle to solve and letters on our name tags, or colors that the letter was written in determined who was in what group. Scrabble letters were offered as another way to randomly select a group. You know me (I know me, I suppose, in this self-reflective journal), I’d bet good money on me making a dumb random group selection app at some point in time.
We were also told to expect the following types in any given group: passengers, protesters, prisoners, participants, and pilots. I’m sure you (I) can guess how each interacts within a group.
As a group, we analyzed a few group sizes to weigh their pros and cons, and had 3s and 8-12s.
Others tackled other group sizes, all just good thought work to something we might do without thinking. For physical tasks we might give athletes, often the group size will suggest itself based on the skill being performed, but with coaching, sometimes it’s not so clear. I do like the groups of 3s for coach development, as having one coach observe another coaching the third person, the ‘athlete’, can be useful, when it comes to coaching coaches and getting people to reflect on the process in real-time. You (I) just need to remember to rotate them so that the task is progressed and each gets equal time to practice coaching.
Conflict Management
Another gem in this module was ways to deal with a bit of conflict or just friction in the groups, whether it’s inaccurate, inapplicable, unhelpful, or counterproductive information or behavior.
So Jim handed out our official Sport Ireland Riot Gear™ and taught us how to use pepper spray, those really hard billy club sticks that extend out, and even how to use a clear plastic shield to squash unruly group members against nearby hard surfaces.
Sadly, none of that actually happened, though it’s clearly a gap in Sport Ireland’s offering; don’t worry, I’m in discussions with the right people now.
Much of the conflict management hailed back to techniques you might use in Questioning. Chris Voss’s book, mentioned earlier, has some great tactics for working with difficult situations.
But there was one overriding theme, and it was to remain open. Remain open to differing opinions to see if they were actually relevant to the task, and possibly use it to enrich the discussion.
If you’re trying to get the train back on the tracks, you can do so gently, steering the group or participant back to the original topic while also acknowledging their contribution… using the old positive sandwich3, if it applies. If the information you’re course-correcting from is wrong or inaccurate, you can (tactfully) use that to frame WHY the other info is correct, and if it’s completely off-topic, you can sidebar the discussion for later.
There were also tools for working with the polar opposites of people who dominate a group and seem to deprive the rest of oxygen, or the others who don’t seem engaged at all. Sometimes the conflict might arise when someone raises points or questions to which you don’t know the answer. But above all, the advice was to not bluff it... if you don’t know the answer, don’t try and fake it, there’s no shame in admitting you’re not all-knowing. And for the two polar opposites’ involvement in the group, in this case you, as the Coach Developer, can guide the group a little more, asking those who haven’t spoken much to contribute in specific ways or provide encouragement and even recruit people who are too or not enough involved to help you more directly. By guiding their role, you can contain them from their domineering role or simply get those who hadn’t been particularly engaged into the action.
The best piece of advice was to have a plan, going into a session, and think ahead for how you might handle group dynamics that are a bit sour or turn that way. I’d use a lot of the deep dives we did into the mechanics of the different group sizes to anticipate issues or blind spots of that group type to build some contingencies into my session plans.
Or cleverly do what Jim did and plant boxing coaches in each group so that everybody behaved; group dynamics sorted.
Yes, Áine and Angela, I’m talking about you two. And probably Kate, too.
Mine mentioned something about being involved with Underwater Hockey Ireland (https://www.facebook.com/underwaterhockeyireland/), so we’re talking very obscure, since I gave one talk to their coaches, ever, and that was it. Great bunch of coaches there, too, incidentally. And it’s not just playing pond ice hockey in warmer weather, as I initially thought.
This is the case where you lead with something good, something that can be worked on, and then something good again. It should probably be called a negative sandwich, since that’s the filling, but I’m not going to nit pick.