Aside from the sports related experiences that coaching gave me over the years, as I have often posted about, my path as a coach and a manager often intersected and who I was in one role and how I came to make decisions or take action in one was more often than that influenced by the other. This was pretty much equally true whether it was my coaching influencing how I managed, or my managerial roles influencing how I coached.
The truth is that for any leadership role, they are generally easy when things are going well. However, how do we plan for when things aren't easy, when we have to face some challenging situations? Lessons in developing managerial, coaching and leadership skills can be found both via sport or the workplace. Preparation is one of the most obvious yet most misunderstood aspects of learning soft skills. Imagine you’re heading off to lead a meeting, make an important pitch for your company, or have a difficult conversation. It’s obvious in these situations that you want to prepare yourself for what you’re going to do or say. But what we often miss when learning soft skills is preparing to manage ourselves, especially when we start to feel the stress and pressure of the real-life situation. In the sports environment, this could be reflecting in dealing with difficult athletes, managing a team through a prolonged losing streak, or preparing a team leading into a major competition. Sadly, corporate training for these situations is notoriously ineffective. We learn new skills in safe situations with few repercussions for mistakes, yet we often have to perform in pressure-filled situations with the potential for great consequences. Our scripted remarks are of little use in unscripted and unpredictable situations. Via sport, the preparation is somewhat different as a lot of training is focused on how to prepare for motivating athletes, getting them to perform at their best, or focusing on issues directly within a coach's control, in an environment which for the most part ( unless at the top levels) is significantly less pressure filled than a typical work, profits dependent situation. To learn soft skills in a way that truly prepares us for what we’ll face when it really matters, we can take a few lessons from a different arena where learning, development, and performance are essential, competitive sports. One key premise of competitive sports coaching, for example, is to prepare athletes in the most realistic contexts possible. Regardless of the sport, when teams prepare for their next opponent, they might take into account the likely conditions they’ll face. It can be something as simply as playing loud music of noises during practices to mimic playing in front of a loud crowd, do significant fitness training to fatigue the athletes to see how they can maintain decision making when tired, creating different competitive scenarios and challenges to have the team prepared to adapt as needed. Many coaches will talk about having an attitude that they want their teams to feel that they have see it all when they step onto the playing surface for a big game. Although we don’t always think along these lines in a business context, it’s certainly possible. For example, you might work on rehearsing a sales itch to potential investors in front of a crowd of colleagues who have been instructed to ask difficult questions. You might create situations when circumstances my force you to finish your presentation in half the time you had planned. In most professional sports, coaching staff might do extensive research on their next opponents to understand their strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies. They then plan for these tendencies in training sessions and develop potential plays where they can take advantage of these predispositions in an actual game. Similarly, in soft skills training, companies can teach people the likely and possible behaviors and responses they’ll encounter in a particular situation, so employees are ready. However, as noted above, this can lead to awkwardly scripted moments that fall flat in real life. So both top sports teams, and star performers go further. Once they’ve identified what they can expect, they think about what might come as a surprise. Instead of showing the team one version of an opponent’s potential play, the savviest coaches will show multiple versions. They might introduce something players have never seen — or in a way they’ve never seen it. Unpredictable simulations are common practice in teaching hospitals, fire or police departments and of course disaster response teams. In my work as a manager within an academic institution, who also happens to oversee security and emergency measures, we try and focus on being prepared for as many possible scenarios as possible. The hard work in learning soft skills comes from having to apply them in complex and unpredictable performance situations. By sensitizing yourself to the actual challenges you’ll face in real situations, you’ll become more flexible and adaptable, and have a far greater chance of succeeding in the situations that matter most. The reality is that whether in sport or in a managerial role, you can't foresee every possible situation with every possible variation. The important thing is teaching athletes or staff to trust in their skill set, understand that in sports and life something things simply can go to shit and keeping calm, focusing on the training and dealing with one situation at a time will more often that not get a group through tough situations. If you have ever watched the film The Martian, towards the end of the film, the Matt Damon character is speaking with a group of students talking about how he dealt with being stranded on Mars. There is a quote that I think covers about dealing with adversity...... "When I was up there, stranded by myself, did I think I was going to die? Yes. Absolutely, and that’s what you need to know going in because it’s going to happen to you. This is space. It does not cooperate. At some point everything is going to go south on you. Everything is going to go south and you’re going to say This is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin. You do the math, you solve one problem. Then you solve the next one, and then the next and if you solve enough problems you get to come home.” Now that was in a film based on a book, on the very specific context of space travel. Hopefully few of any of the adversity or tough situations you might face in sport or in the workplace with be life or death or at least not to that level however I think the mindset presented by that quote is very applicable. When things get tough, you can freak out, be pessimistic and assume all is lost, or you can take a breath, focus on the situation and tackle things one a a time, one step at a time and when you get through enough of the small issues, the big issues take care of themselves. So whether you are a coach or a manager, train your athletes or employees to trust in themselves, trust in the process or feel empowered to deal with anything.
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AuthorAfter many years of coaching at various levels and with different teams, I thought I would share some of my experiences and thoughts about coaching. Archives
January 2023
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