This morning I received an email from a Rugby coach in New Zealand about the evolution of leadership and coaching in rugby. Thought it would be of interest to everyone who coaches any football code – or any team sport for that matter:

Email to www.sportscoachingbrain.com

Hi Wayne,
 
I coach a 1st XV rugby side in New Zealand that has a history of finishing at the top. However in recent years we have come up short when the pressure has taken it toll on the side and I have been trying to find the point of difference to change this.
 
Thanks for this piece. We are at play-off time now and this is a good refresher going into the business end of the season.
 
Ownership for one’s self in all that he or she does is vital for young athletes in 2010. That is my summary of your last piece.
 
Regards
 

www.sportscoachingbrain.com response to the Coach:
 
Thanks for the email.

Basically in the old days we coached the whole team the same way.
Then we moved to coaching backs or forwards.
Then it became units - i.e. inside backs / outside backs, front three etc.
Then we moved to coaching each position – i.e. all wingers, all back rowers, all tight heads etc had their own program by position.
Now it is about the optimal preparation of each individual in the team and training each person to realise their own personal peak performance potential.
The evolution means that each individual player has to accept the responsibility for their own performance and be consistently as professional off field in all aspects of their life as they are when they train and play.
We don’t coach at players – we work with them collaboratively to achieve the possible and impossible.
 
Any rugby coach still coaching the whole team the same way with one big team program is 30 years behind the times and doomed to failure.

The future is about collaboration, sharing, growing, partnering and ensuring everyone in the organisation is working consistently to their full potential. Then…anything is possible.
 
Thanks,

WG

© 2010, Sports Coaching Brain. All rights reserved. This post can not be reproduced in full or in part without the expressed consent of the author Wayne Goldsmith.

There was a time when a new head was the solution to all problems in a high performance sports team.

Team not winning - get a new head coach.

Team’s culture not right – get a new head coach.

Team’s attitude and commitment flagging – get a new head coach.

Times have changed.

A new head coach is no longer the solution in high performance sport.

There was a time, not so long ago, when the Head Coach was the Club.

The head coach selected all the players, the head coach selected all the staff, the head coach set the strategic and tactical direction for the team, the head coach created and developed the team’s culture: hiring a head was once the panacea to all sporting ills. But no more.

Time and time again we see sporting organisations, professional clubs and even national teams in all sports (but particularly the football codes), fail to perform,  undertake a review, come up with a genius solution like “sack the head coach and hire a new one“ and then wait back and watch the Trophy Cabinet fill with medals, cups and awards - they wish.

And then, two, three or four years later, after another series of failures, they do another review, sack another coach and hire one more.

Some teams will go through this performance clock cycle again and again and again and always look to changing the head coach as the one size fits all solution to all their performance and organisational problems.

And they continue to fail.

So what’s the reason?

Pretty simple when you think about it.

As high performance sport has become more complex so too has the ownership of the culture of sporting organisations.

In the past, the culture of a team was very much that which was created by and grown by the head coach – the head coach was the team.

Now players own the culture of the team. The board owns it. The management owns it. The staff and the adminstration own it. The fans own it. The media owns it. Everyone has a piece of the ownership of the culture of the sporting organisation.

And in that environment, hiring one man or one woman and expecting them to completely and permanently change the culture of the organisation is ridiculous. It’s like expecting everyone in the USA to change language, clothing and culture because someone opened a Chinese restaurant in Iowa: cultures only change when there is widespread support for change.

This is particularly true when sports hire an overseas coach and expect them to completely and permanently change the total culture of the sport and in doing so achieve international competition success. No head coach can do – or should try to do this.

The job of a new head coach is to provide high level technical skills, tactical abilities and strategic knowledge which enhances the culture of the sport: their job is not to try completely change the culture of the sport mainly because they don’t own it and never will.  Culture change comes only when everyone in the sport or club or team wants it, is committed to it and has made a personal decision to embrace it.

A team plays like, acts like, thinks like, performs like the culture that creates it.

A team surrounded by a great culture, positive people, innovative thinkers, people committed to excellence and high performance success, is consistently competitive in all competitions.

A team created and managed by negative, political, egotistical, narrow minded, untalented, selfish people, fails and fails and fails again. And 10000 new head coaches will not make any difference!

Sustainable change grows from inside to out. It can not be forced. You can’t legislate it. You can’t bully people into embracing it. You can’t create change by sending out emails and newsletters or holding “workshops” - real change is only possible when it is embraced by every individual in the organisation.

Consider one National Sporting organisation I have come across in recent years.

• Their Board is heavily political and is constantly divided along representation lines (i.e. divided by the fact Board members are voted on to the national board by regional associations so they can’t act independently and in the national interest);
• There is no one in their office administration who has ever played or coached the sport at the highest level;
• Their coach education and development structure has not changed or improved since the 1980s;
• Their senior coaches are an “old boys” club and strongly resist any efforts to change, to learn and to become the most innovative group of coaches in the world;
• Their executive leadership are more interested in business class travel and sipping champagne in the corporate box than they are about being the world’s leading sporting organisation;
• Whilst the number of  their office administration staff has grown by 200% in recent years, funding to critical high performance areas has plumetted;
• Their national team sports science, sports medicine and performance science support is tired, outdated and split along sports science discipline grounds rather than functioning as a integrated high level team;
• Their overall high performance culture is one of ego, selfishness, close mindedness, arrogance and ignorance - “our way is the best way” and “that’s the way we do it here” are their mantras.

So if they did a review, what’s the first thing they would come up with??? “Let’s hire a new head coach“.

Not “we all need to work together, to be 100% committed to change and individually and collectively be the best in the world at what we do” – but “let’s hire a new head coach”.

Great coaches are leaders but only when the organisation is totally committed to support their leadership.

Great coaches are innovative and creative but only when everyone in the organisation is similarly committed to innovation and creativity.

Great coaches are change drivers but only when the athletes, assistant coaches, support team and the organisation as a whole also embrace change.

Great coaches are capable of amazing things but only when the people around them, the people who created and sustain the culture of the organisation are similarly capable of striving to achieve amazing things.

In other words, hiring a new head coach to enhance performance is only going to work when every person in the organisation is as committed to change, to learning, to innovation, to taking risks and to excellence as the incoming head coach is.

Everyone in high performance sport is improving. Thank the internet for that.

Anyone can find out anything, anytime, anywhere and without spending any money.

So now, everyone knows what you know.

In this high performance sports environment, it is not what you know that is critical – it is your rate of learning: your ability to learn fast, change quickly, innovate sooner and accelerate performance improvement faster than your opposition. At a time when everyone is improving, you must improve faster!

So in this climate, hiring a head coach means one thing above all - you are hiring someone capable of accelerating the rate of change of the organisation and in doing so accelerate the rate of performance enhancement of the athletes, coaches, staff and team.

But one thing is for certain, unless everyone in the organisation is willing and capable of similarly accelerating their own rate of change  - a rate of change which is aligned with the rate of change being initated by the head coach, things will not improve.

It is easy to write a position description for a head coach and a list of interview questions to go along with it.

However, more importantly, long before you write out a list of questions for the potential new head coach to answer, ask yourself these five questions:

1. Am I personally ready, willing and able to uncompromisingly embrace change and support the new head coach as he / she works to enhance the performance of the athletes and team?
2. Will I do all I can to support the head coach’s efforts to create and grow unity of purpose, direction and energy?
3. Will I work to the best of my ability to enhance my own personal and professional performance  and to be committed to learning, growing and developing at a faster rate than at any time in my career?
4. Will I accept the changes and innovations driven by the head coach and put aside any negativity, political actions and personality conflicts, i.e. can I put the success of the team selflessly ahead of my own ego and ambitions?
5. Will my own personal contribution be consistently better than anyone in my role in any organisation in our competition?

If the answer to any of these questions is “NO” – then hiring a new head coach will not provide you with the success you think it will.

If everyone in the organisation, from the Board to the Basement embraces change, innovation, creativity and a commitment to being the best, then hiring a new head coach can be the catalyst of great things.

If you can’t support the head coach and the rate of change he / she has been hired to initiate,  the only person who should be applying for another job is the person who see in the mirror each morning.

Wayne Goldsmith

© 2010, Sports Coaching Brain. All rights reserved. This post can not be reproduced in full or in part without the expressed consent of the author Wayne Goldsmith.

What are we all chasing in high performance sport?

What is high performance coaching seeking to achieve?

Why do we focus so much on player leadership?

Why do we spend so much time talking about professionalism, standards, attitudes, commitment and passion?

Because we want to achieve one thing: we want to create an environment where our athletes’ Passion to Prepare is equal to or greater than their Potential to Perform.

It’s the key question in high performance sport: how do I create an environment where the athletes’ passion to prepare – their commitment to preparation, training, off field professionalism, etc is equal to or greater than their potential (talent) to perform.

In some way, we grapple with this question and the many related questions everyday:

1. Do I recruit on talent or on attitude, personality and passion to succeed? Answer - in a perfect world, we want talented athletes with the commitment to succeed: aptitude plus attitude.
2. How can I create an environment where each individual athlete is competing to their full potential? Answer – create an environment where each athlete consistently demonstrates a passion to prepare.
3. How can I help my athletes realise their performance goals? Answer – by ensuring each athlete prepares better - more consistently – than anyone in their event (or role or position) in the competition.

All these issues have the same basic philosophy – matching ability with attitude, talent with tenacity, genetics with grit and potential with performance. It’s the key element in quality coaching – engaging the athlete fully – mind, heart, body and soul with their program so that they embrace excellence in everything they do.

This is critical to anyone who wants to succeed at the top level: talent is not enough – unless that talent is driven by an unrelenting desire to be the best and that desire is supported by an uncompromising commitment to excellence in all aspects of preparation.

There are basically four different types of athletes: the PALTS, the PAHTs, the GALTs and the GAHTs.

• PALTs: Poor on Attitude – Low on Talent: PALTs lack both the attitude and aptitude to be successful in high performance sport and therefore don’t make it much past schools level competition – (and usually then they are only involved in sport because they have been forced to be involved);
• PAHTs: Poor on Attitude – High on Talent: In many ways, PAHTs are the most challenging and demanding athletes to coach. They have the physical talent and natural physical abilities to succeed but their lack of commitment, determination and professionalism bring more frustration than fun for coaches.  Many of the issues involving team discipline come from PAHTs. Often, PAHTs have been early maturers or athletes who demonstrated a precocious talent when they were young and never learnt the key preparation fundamentals of discipline, hard work, commitment and perseverance: they had too much – too soon – too easy.
• GALTSs: Great on Attitude – Low on Talent: The vast majority of elite athletes, even at professional level are GALTS – athletes with some talent (otherwise they could not have got to professional level) but whose great strengths are their attitude, their dedication, their discipline, their values, their off field professionalism, their honesty, their desire to play the game and their passion to prepare. Coaches are usually great at working with these athletes…they have to be…because they see so many of them;
• GAHTs: Great on Attitude – High on Talent: Possessing the complete package – GAHTs are the champions, the world record holders, the Olympic Gold medalists, the All-Stars players, the MVPS, the best of the best. GAHTs are harder to hide than to find - and will succeed regardless of the situation, the challenge, the environment, the adversity or the difficulties they face.

The big question then is can you turn a PALT, PAHT or GALT into a GAHT? And if so, how?

Without doubt, when I work with coaches and teams, this one issue dominates all others: “how do I ensure every player in my team is preparing – consistently – to the best of their ability – so that their passion to prepare is equal to or greater than their potential to perform”.

Investing in a world class high performance environment (i.e. anything you can build or buy), gym facilities, sports science, recovery centres and similar high performance tools is useless without also investing in the human factor – investing in creating a culture where each player takes full advantage of the high performance environment through their passion to prepare.

Which would you rather have? A brand new gym, with the best of the best machines, training equipment and power training devices but where the players arrive late, perform their routines with poor technique, cut reps out of their programs and finish early….

Or an older gym, with ten year old machines, equipment and devices but where every player works to their full potential every time they walk in the gym door?

The answer is of course…..we want both: we want the latest in high performance training tools and we want a winning attitude to drive them.

Can we have both?

What do you think? Let me know.

Wayne Goldsmith

© 2010, Sports Coaching Brain. All rights reserved. This post can not be reproduced in full or in part without the expressed consent of the author Wayne Goldsmith.

Quick.

Write down your own list of the top ten skills of quality coaching. What does it look like? Something like this?

1. Communication skills;
2. Passion;
3. Empathy with athletes;
4. The ability to engage with athletes and inspire athletes to fully engage with the program;
5. Enthusiasm;
6. Technical knowledge;
7. An understanding of the relevant principles of sports science and sports medicine;
8. Energy;
9. Curiosity (which inspires a passion for learning);
10. A commitment to continuous improvement and accelerated learning.

You could add hundreds of skills to this list: experience, drive, initiative, the will to win, attention to detail, commitment, vision, determination, a strong work ethic…………there are as many desirable coaching skills as there are coaches.

But, in this century, there is one coaching skill to rule them all – creativity: creative coaching.

The question is…...can you teach coaches to be creative?

The simple answer is – to quote the US President – Yes we can! We can teach coaches to be creative.

It is not easy: it is much easier to teach what’s known, what’s been published, what’s been researched, or what’s been done before than it is to teach coaches how to create something new.

But, now, more than ever, creativity is a critical coaching skill and the ability to accelerate learning faster than your opposition has never been more important.

In the pre-Internet days, coaches came up with new ideas, created new plays, created new training techniques and gained a winning advantage over their opposition.

Now, any winning advantage lasts about two minutes!!!

You come up with a new idea, you nurture it, you grow it, you kick it around with your coaching colleagues seeking feedback and after a lot of thinking you decide to take a risk by introducing it to your athletes at training and……..two minutes later…..the dad of one of the athletes has taken a video of your revolutionary new idea on his Blackberry, uploaded it to YouTube and players all over the world have free and immediate access to your best and most brilliant thinking.

That’s the world we live in and the half-life of ideas is only going to get shorter as mobile technologies and social media tools become more efficient, more powerful, more accessible and cheaper.

So, the challenge for coaches seeking to gain a winning advantage is to become more creative: to create new ideas, new directions and new paths to help athletes to enhance their performance.

Winning coaching in this century means learning faster, creating faster and applying ideas faster: faster than your opposition and faster than at anytime in the history of sport.

Five Golden Rules of Creative Coaching:

1. The idea must be new to your sport - it can’t just be a copy of something someone else is doing or has done. But it can be an idea you have from another sport or another field of endeavour;
2. It must work – it must improve performance;
3. It must be able to be communicated and understood by athletes who can then use the idea to accelerate their rate of their performance enhancement;
4. It must itself be flexible and also subject to change, adaptation and evolution: there is no place for static thinking in sport;
5. It must not be limited by the restrictions or boundaries of past thinking, i.e. to be truly creative the idea must not have limits imposed on it based on what has worked or not worked in the past.

The opportunity for the creative coach to be successful has never been greater. In the past, the opportunity to be a successful coach may have been limited to the coach’s access to quality information, the latest coaching resources or coach education programs.

Now, all you need is access to a laptop and an Internet connection and all that has limited you in the past is readily available.

• Want to learn drills for football? There are hundreds of free videos on YouTube on football drills.
• Want to read and listen to the views of world class coaches on success and winning? Google the name of the world’s leading coaches and see what comes up……tens of thousands of pages of information.
• Want to find out how to test aerobic capacity of athletes? Then search for “aerobic tests for athletes” on Yahoo and look at the hundreds of options you get.

Knowledge is not the limiting factor in coaching: it’s creativity. It’s being more creative than your opposition and it’s your capacity to take what’s known and, by being creative, going into the unknown.

Summary:

1. With the plethora of information available through the Internet and the capacity for coaches (and athletes and parents of athletes) to get any information they need anywhere, anytime, knowledge is no longer the “power” of coaching;
2. Whereas ten years ago, the core skills of coaching were knowledge based – e.g. technical knowledge, sports science knowledge, planning and periodization knowledge, now with powerful portable computers, Smart-phones and other electronic devices so widely available, you can pretty much assume that everyone knows what you know. There are no “secret sets”, no “magic gym sessions” – everyone knows what you know;
3. So given that everyone has access to the same knowledge base – as a coach how can you win?
   • By learning faster and accelerating your rate of learning;
   • By creating new, effective, innovative ways of doing what you do;
   • By creating an effective learning environment where your athletes can learn faster than their opposition;
   • By not limiting your sources of  creativity, inspiration and ideas to sources within your own sport;
   • By rejecting TTWWDIH (that’s the way we do it here) thinking and anything that limits open thinking, creativity and innovation – accept no limits to your learning and no cage for your creativity;
4. Creativity as a core coaching skill has never been more important: take a risk, be innovative and change your sport with creative coaching.

Coming in March 2010: How to be creative – thinking and coaching outside the box.

Wayne Goldsmith

© 2010, Sports Coaching Brain. All rights reserved. This post can not be reproduced in full or in part without the expressed consent of the author Wayne Goldsmith.

We have all done it.

We have all been involved in debates, discussions and deliberations about what coaching is.

Some people say it is about teaching and learning skills. Others say it’s about sports science and applying a scientific method approach to planning and periodisation. Others say it’s about communication and caring. Still others believe coaching is about emotions like passion or it’s about values like commitment, honesty, integrity, humility, courage and discipline.

To add to the confusion, you get the coaching “zealots” who are promoting one type of coaching philosophy over another (in an effort to create a commercial success from their theories about coaching) who are convinced coaching is about the ABC Technique of Coaching or Homer Simpson’s Guide to Effective Coaching or some whiz bang made up word like Coaching Readiness for Accelerated Performance (I hope you spotted the acronym)!

Coaching is about one thing above all others…engagement.

The one thing that separates great coaching from average coaching is engagement: it’s what it’s all about. The ability to consistently engage the hearts and minds of your athletes – it’s what we strive for – it is the very essence of coaching – it is what makes coaches (and athletes) feel alive.

• A training session without engagement is just a bunch of people exercising together;
• Communication without engagement is just talking;
• Sports science without engagement is just measurement;
• Periodisation without engagement is just a plan;
• Having the world’s best facilities and equipment without engagement is just window dressing;
• Coaching without engagement is…..not coaching.

As an inexperienced coach, you continually seek new ideas, try new products, learn new techniques and bright shiny exercises machines. You become obsessed with finding a short cut, a quick fix, an instant answer, a miracle ingredient to fast track the improvement of your athletes.

And there are plenty of people out there ready to offer it to you!

So you buy videos and books and new gym equipment and DVDs and testing products and supplements and keep looking for something – that one thing that will enhance your coaching performance.

But, no matter what you buy, no matter what you read, no matter what you watch, in the end, the effectiveness of everything you do comes down to the level of engagement of your athletes.

You spend millions on a state of the art gym but…your athletes turn up late, don’t warm up, don’t stretch, train with poor technique, don’t rehydrate and perform their exercises with minimal effort so…you might as well have built them a garden shed and given them a few big rocks to throw around.

You spend weeks planning a meticulously detailed periodised plan. Every session – every cycle – every session is planned to moment but… your athletes train with poor technique, they execute skills in training poorly and with no attention to detail, they demonstrate poor skills execution in training as they fatigue and only give 80% effort on their fitness work so….you might as well have made it up on the day.

You agonise over recruiting the best possible players for your team. You study the videos. You agonise over the statistics. You analyse the test results. You recruit who you think are the players who will win you that illusive title but….they have poor discipline, can’t manage alcohol, don’t eat or sleep like professional athletes and never give you 100% on the training field so… you might as well have just recruited my mum (a wonderful woman but no athlete!).

So why is engagement so critical? And it is critical – it underpins everything.

Because athletes (and coaches and managers and staff for that matter) who are truly engaged with what they are doing, consistently train and compete to their full potential and….from potential comes peak performance.

No one wins by giving anything less than their best: winning happens by consistently preparing and competing to your full potential.

And this is the real gift that all the great coaches posssess - to be able to turn involvement into commitment – to be able to turn desire into action and to be able to turn potential into performance.

Summary:

1. Use any technique or philosophy or paradigm or coaching school you like in your coaching: what you do, is up to you - the critical issue is engagement;
2. More than ever coaching is about how – not what. You can get any “what” you want from the Internet. Want to really improve your coaching- forget buying books on physiology, biomechanics and nutrition – forget buying heart rate monitors and lactate analysers - invest some time, energy and money into enhancing your ability to engage your athletes to the full extent of their potential in every training and competition activity.

Wayne Goldsmith

© 2009 – 2010, Sports Coaching Brain. All rights reserved. This post can not be reproduced in full or in part without the expressed consent of the author Wayne Goldsmith.