Part 9: Coach Developer Leadership, Reflection, & Action Planning
Weekend Four, CEVSCA U18W weekend...
10. Leadership
Like the last weekend, where I missed the Saturday classroom session, I missed even more this weekend by missing out on both days, the classroom day and the all-important mock assessment Sunday where I could have practiced my formal session delivery before weekend five. But I missed it because I was in Malta with the U18 Women’s National Volleyball Team in the Small Countries’ Association Championship, where the girls got their first two official international wins, taking Scotland 3-2 and Northern Ireland in a payback match for the Saint Patrick’s Challenge, 3-0.
Now, it’s a shame I missed the weekend, but man, oh man, I wouldn’t have missed that silver medal for anything.
The first module they covered was Leadership, which I’ve looked into a few times, including taking a really excellent class from TU Delft called Leadership for Engineers (https://learning.edx.org/course/course-v1:DelftX+LfE101x+3T2016/home) and one from Harvard called Leaders of Learning (https://learning.edx.org/course/course-v1:HarvardX+GSE2x+2T2017/home).
Looking at the slides and material from the weekend, there was a big focus on making it clear that there is a difference between leaders and managers, and what our role should be, as Coach Developers, which is to lead coaches in their own development by involving them heavily in the process. I spent a lot of years at Apple in Cupertino, and one of the most successful things Apple did, in that time, anyway, was empower its individual contributors to do just that, contribute. In most of my time at Apple, the hierarchical structure was always pretty flat, compared with other organizations, and managers were very keen to let their employees get on with their work, because we were trusted to get the work done; after all, why had we been hired in the first place?
In the Leadership for Engineers course, we outlined a checklist for implementing new behaviors. Since much of leadership is about change, and learning, true learning results in change, this gives us a decent model for how we might pitch change.
This was the checklist for implementing new behaviors:1
Creating a realistic (yet motivating enough) ambition
Be specific in defining how you frame the ambition or goal
Understand what you are going to resist when you are implementing this new behavior (what would you be doing instead)
Understanding other commitments we’re now competing against
Understand you can only implement one new habit at a time (about 30 days)
The reason why a checklist here is so handy is because, especially with engineers2, is because change, even the prospect of change, sometimes causes a flight or fight response… the amygdala hijack. So in response to this knee-jerk reaction we need to involve the neocortex and pause, consider, and respond, rather than leap to reaction without a bit of consideration.
In terms of my own leadership style and qualities, I do think I try to model a sustainable leadership style3, which has developed since I ran into it in the Leadership for Engineers course. It involves a lot of relationship building, systems thinking, and a sustainable mindset. In sustainable leadership you don’t necessarily have the title or the power to enact change just by decreeing it, so you have to recruit people into your change, which is often the case in the corporate world and the sports world alike.
We’re also rarely working in a vacuum, so having a look at the overall system in which you’re operating is so important. And, with your eyes on a long-term, not just a quick win, you’re trying to set the team up for a greater period of success built on improved foundations, so that you, as the leader, aren’t the single point of failure, so that if you leave, the whole enterprise crumbles. Because I am comfortable working with ambiguity, am adaptable, and try to remain curious, it helps me guide teams to good outcomes.
I didn’t know about it until last year, when I read Hugh McCutcheon’s book Championship Behaviors, A Model for Competitive Excellence in Sports, but I also think I practice a leadership style of “belligerent optimism”4 where I try to model a positive outlook in the classroom and on the court. Part of that stems from the fact that the folks who show up, for coaching clinics or training sessions, are putting in the time to try and work on something, so that fact alone means they’re at least putting some thought and care into the process.
What I Could Improve
Now, I certainly need work on delegation, as a leader, especially if I want to ensure long-term survival and thriving of the groups with whom I work. I can also probably, somewhat paradoxically, be more autocratic in certain instances, especially considering the people for whom I am meant to lead, because sometimes when you try to be too open decisions can get stalled or weakened by too many compromises and half-commitments to an idea or path. As a part of this, I’m excited that this course has been all about developing us as Coach Developers, so now I have a lot more tools and structure in my thinking about how to help bring up that next generation of coaches.
11. Reflection & Action Planning
Reflection
Now, in the Debriefing and Feedback module there was talk about tools that can also help us with reflecting on our sessions and progress thus far. Like this reflective journal, which is long, but that’s because it’s serving a dual purpose of recapping the things we covered in CDC 41 for me and for an audience, I’ve got a little more detail than might have in a non-public journal, but it’s still been a nice exercise to recap the weekends as they’ve gone, and then revisit the whole lot at the very end of the process.
As I mentioned above, I find the What, So What, and Now What reflection technique good, as well as the LEARNS checklist for reviewing and reflecting on things.
The Reflective Cycle, diagram above, is nice because it takes the 3D Process, also mentioned way above, and maps it to a cyclical review process. Get out a description of what happened, first, just the facts, ma’am, and then the feelings around the events. With those two you can evaluate them against things like the SMART-ness of the outcomes… were they achieved? What went well? What could have been done better? The conclusions should offer areas of improvement which can be turned into action, kicking off the whole process again.
In weekend five, which I finally did attend, myself and another coach developer reviewed each others’ session plans for the final assessment for the next day. Having that critical technical review of my plan was incredibly useful. It resulted in a big re-write that evening prior to the delivery, but it was incredibly helpful and I was much more organized, going into the actual thing the next day. Peer review is a great way to get extra eyes on something and also see how someone else has done something (there were a lot of pieces of James’s work I was happy to steal!).
In the additional material there was mention of De Bono’s 6 Thinking Hats5, as a way of parallelizing thinking, and I’d love to dive a little deeper into that… I’ve watched the videos, I’ve read the table of hat descriptions and I find it intriguing. Reflecting back on teams I’ve worked in or played in or coached in, I’m not sure how much buy-in I would get to the process, but I think I like the process. The appearance of 6 Value Medals on the same site referenced below makes me worry it’s like someone’s been inspired by the 12 Days of Christmas song for their productivity tools or is a former Buzzfeed headline writer, but I would try to tamp those concerns down to willingly suspend the disbelief for just a bit to investigate the hats more.
Another resource in which I found reflective inspiration was MIT’s Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship Anti-Fragile Speaker Series. https://entrepreneurship.mit.edu/antifragile-speaker-series/ This series encouraged reflection by asking the following three questions (or similar) at the end of your week:
What did I learn this week?
Where did I fail this week and why?
Where did I succeed this week and why?
Action Planning
Again, I missed this module, but it would seem to me that to come up with a personal action plan you’re going to use so many of the tools now in our toolbox. SMART goals and outcomes, the reflective cycle, and the checklist for implementing new behaviors I picked up in that other course. But maybe amended, to look like this:
The most important thing is to be realistic in your scope: you can’t boil the ocean, as they say.
For action planning,I follow a lot of the same procedures outlined in the App Design Workbook (https://www.thecodehub.ie/news/app-design/), where we define what it is we’re building… and inside that definition we break it down further, into features. Features would have certain functions they need to perform. For example, if we had a grand goal of Training a Whole New Generation of Youth Volleyball Coaches, we might break that down into a series of ‘features’, from basic motor learning skills to pedagogy to volleyball-specific skills to team systems and more. We can’t possibly design a plan for all of that, all at once, but we can say, peel off Basic Warm-Up Games to Play with Volleyball Players, and inside of that feature, list a few games, a few key coaching points coaches should focus on. That might still be too big a chunk to digest, so we would prioritize the coaching points, and write up session plans for those pieces that are highest priority.
It looks like a line above, but it is also cyclical, and when we iterate, we don’t always need to start from scratch. Sometimes we can tweak our goal or tasks based on feedback we’ve gotten along the way.
When I’m working with coaches, I often use a whiteboard or digital whiteboard like Miro to capture the progress and process, but if that isn’t working for a coach, Canva (https://www.canva.com/docs/action-plans/) have some nice resources that they may find more useful. I would encourage them to keep SMART in mind, and keep it manageable, but I love to see some of the tools people use in their daily life or job that we might be able to apply to the coaching world.
Yes, I will be putting this in checklist form like the others above, just a little later in the journal… just wait for it…
I should probably say, “especially with human beings,” but then it might sound like I’ve worked with a lot of animals or aliens.
In the course it was pitched as an alternative to older models, such as trait-based, transformational, servant, hero leadership, see https://emeritus.org/blog/leadership-sustainable-leadership/
Take that, Martin Seligman (https://www.amazon.com/Learned-Optimism-Change-Your-Mind/dp/1400078393) and Mike Hebert (https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Volleyball-Mike-Hebert/dp/1450442625) - I leaned heavily on Mike’s book in Italy and Malta this year with the U18W’s team, trying to get them to a place of team trust and learn to trust themselves on the court with a lot of the insight in Mike’s book.
I can’t help but think this is all about some sentient hats, but apparently, it’s not: https://www.debonogroup.com/services/core-programs/six-thinking-hats/