by Dr. Cory Dobbs, a national leader in providing leadership resources for coaches and student-athletes. The most recent resources include Coaching for Leadership and Teamwork Intelligence: a workbook for the student-athlete along with a facilitator’s guide for the coach.

Excerpt from “Coaching for Leadership”

Are you a talented coach on the rise? Do you want to be an “A‐Level” coach? Are you interested in becoming an elite leader? Think deeply about these three questions before moving on.

Instead of assuming leaders are born with the “right stuff” to lead, I start with the assertion that leadership is a talent. If that talent is to be advanced the coach needs a context that supports the development, get the experiences they need to cultivate their leadership ability and possess the drive to master learning to lead.

Let me make another claim: talented people want to be challenged, not coddled. As a coach to coaches I know this to be true. And as a coach I’m sure you will agree success isn’t something you simply hope happens. It is high achievement accomplished by consistent, deliberate, and intense preparation and commitment to a goal with a daily plan of action based on choices you make.

In your version of reality you may have “high potential” stamped on your forehead and be successful in your own mind. All this may be true, but don’t be deluded. Odds are you’re nowhere near where you want to go and who you want to be. If you really want to stand out, lift your performance to its peak, break into the small circle of elite performers, then accept that life is not a do‐it‐yourself project. If you surround yourself with winners—or are fortunate enough to have a skilled and caring mentor in your corner—you are likely on a winning path toward the success you covet. We all need people who help us look at situations from a different perspective.

Today, top athletes, actors, musicians and corporate leaders have begun to use performance coaches to help them reach their potential. They’ve chosen coaching as a way to shorten their path to sustained success. What they know is that good coaching will get them where they want to go, help them achieve what they want to achieve, and transform them into who they want to be.

REALITY BITES
Here’s your first bite of reality. As determined as you are, you might never get to where you want to go. You ask; why is this?

The answer: blind spots. All coaches have blind spots. Yes, we all have blind spots, but this is about you.

I know how badly you want to be good—no great! So it’s important for me to let you know that blind spots are real and really capable of derailing your efforts to reach your potential.

You’ve spent most of your life committed to particular ways of thinking, doing, and being, and that’s a good thing; and a bad thing. It guarantees blind spots. Don’t checkout yet. Let me be clear about this: it is never easy to bring about a mindset change. But that’s not enough. Another bite of reality is that it’s more difficult to replace a simple way of thinking with a more complex way; which of course, is likely necessary to become an elite coach.

So, what is a blind spot? A blind spot is a weakness that other people see but we don’t. The crazy thing is, because a blind spot is not known to us, we simply don’t know what we’re doing wrong and what we can do to get better outcomes. We have no idea how a certain coaching behavior of ours is coming across to our stakeholders—players, parents, coaches, and administrators—but it is. A blind spot is an outer reality. That is, it exists outside of us, yet inside of others.

There are various sorts of blind spots that can lead to ineffective coaching to some degree or another, but one particular form holds many coaches back from great success. That is, a behavioral blind spot. A behavioral blind spot is the unproductive or destructive behavior that undermines or erodes interpersonal influence and the building of durable and enduring relationships.

To ease into the idea of blind spots think of it as something similar to the blind spots we encounter when driving a vehicle. Several years ago while driving a large truck I bumped up against a car in the other lane, hidden in my blind spot, without knowing it. The car sped up to get alongside me. I spotted a crazy man pumping his arms and screaming at me. I pulled over and, sure enough, unbeknownst to me I had sideswiped the driver‐side door of the crazy guy’s car. Yes, I failed to use the tool built for reducing blind spots—the mirror.

Getting a grip on reality requires a heavy dose of reality. Here’s a start: Deep changes in how people think, what they believe, and how they see the world are difficult to achieve. Experts will tell you such change is downright impossible to bring about through compliance. You’ve got to want to change.

THE EDGE OF REALITY
Self‐awareness has limits. Taken in isolation, the problem with self‐awareness is that what others think of our behavior takes place outside of our awareness. The built in constraint is that self-awareness only reveals what we can see as what we can know, not what we can’t see and not know. We are essentially disconnected from the effects of our behavior; we are blind to the internal reality of the other. All this makes it difficult to know there’s a need to change our behavior. I think this is what author and psychologist R.D. Laing meant when he said, “The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.”

Because people don’t know blinds spots exist, they aren’t searching to understand how others’ experience them. Consequently, if someone tries to bring a blind spot to one’s attention, it’s likely to be brushed off. The message will be disregarded and discarded. Let’s be clear, if someone told you that you are behaving in a way that is having a negative impact on others, your initial reaction will be to take a defensive posture.

Our ability to confront ourselves is crucial to building insight and understanding and tackling the truth of our blind spots. Our willingness to venture out of our comfort zone and see things from others’ perspectives is vital to achieving peak performance. This takes courage but offers great rewards.

Reality demands change. The biggest threat, the most resistant barrier, to personal change is you. Please do not take this to mean that you’re not motivated or talented. You wouldn’t be where you are, in position to get to the peak of your mountain, if that were the case. It’s just that desire and motivation aren’t enough. The reality is that the ability to initiate and persist with deep change is often exasperatingly elusive for most of us. Grasp that reality!

Yet, as the world maddeningly changes, so must we. The greatest power we have is the ability to envision our own fate and to action to change ourselves. However, the unavoidable question is can you do it by yourself?

REALITY CHECK
Like the rest of the world—government, medicine, education, and business— sports has relied on the doctrine of scientific management: the theory that any task process can be broken down to its component parts and then reassembled in an efficient “scientific” manner. That sort of thinking, a mechanistic view of management, fostered assembly lines and military hierarchies. And it’s fostered a social preference in which building relationships is not as important as task accomplishment—winning trumps all.

Today, we still have many assembly lines (such as schools) and hierarchies are still a favored organizational structure. However, more frequently these industrial age artifacts are adapting to and changing how the individual, the organization, and society interrelate. Change invariably reveals blind spots, and blind spots are deep and difficult impediments to growth.

Let me step onto thin ice. Every coach utilizes “constructive yelling” (my quotes) under the theory that if a player can’t survive a spirited “talking to,” the opponent will kill her. This idea may work, sometimes. And other times it might not. Rather, it’s simply a taken‐for‐granted coaching behavior, a “coaching style,” a way of “motivating” athletes. But until we have the courage to explore such coaching behaviors from a variety of frameworks—certainly to include the athlete’s perspective—we might just be feeding a blind spot.

Here’s how it happens. A team is a human community. It is a living system, like a plant. So, all teams are made up of people. And people are emotional. When engaged emotionally people easily lose perspective. Because people are emotional and lose perspective things are not always as they seem. In a nut shell, to lead effectively involves the need to recognize and acknowledge the importance of dealing with both one’s own feelings and emotions and those of the others in an interaction.

Now, stay with me. Every relationship involves reciprocal relational dynamics such as trust or distrust, respect or disrespect, liking or disliking, and dominance or autonomy. Consequently, these dynamics either reinforce relational growth processes or introduce limiting forces that impede the development of a durable relationship.

Here’s a reality check. Without recognizing how certain behaviors negatively impact others, you won’t be able to change your unproductive and destructive behaviors. Most of us fall into this trap, thinking we are always acting in the best interests of the student‐athletes. That’s just not true. Unfortunately, we continue unaware of the negative impact our behaviors create. The causal chain is clear: the fastest way to cause cohesion and morale to erode is to deny that a behavioral blind spot exists or to ignore it.

Discipline and determination are necessary, but it is the discovery of behavioral blind spots that is essential to unlocking your coaching potential. The better you know your strengths and weaknesses, your likes and dislikes—the better you know where you’ve been, where you want to go and what it will take to get you there—the better you can set your goals and craft a plan to get there. However, if you have a faulty behavioral blind spot you are destined to limit your growth and development into the great coach you want to become.

To find out more about and order Sport Leadership Books authored by Dr. Dobbs including Coaching for Leadership, click this link: The Academy for Sport Leadership Books

Click here to read Part 2

About the Author

Cory Dobbs is the founder and president of The Academy for Sport Leadership, a national leader in research‐based curriculum for coaches and student‐athletes. Dr. Dobbs is a college educator, a coach to successful coaches (helping coaches attain a higher level of success), and an accomplished human performance specialist whose expertise is in the field of leadership, team building, and creating a high‐performance culture in the arena of team sports. Cory blends social‐personality, psychology, and applied social psychology, which means he studies how people’s thoughts, behaviors, and preferences are influenced by both who they are and the situations they’re in. He uses Teamwork IntelligenceTM to help teams explore how the mix of perspectives brought by their individual members influences their work together.

What to do: Contact Cory directly. Start a conversation on how you can reach your coaching potential.
Dr. Cory Dobbs
(623) 330.3831 (call or text)

 

This article was written and submitted by J.P. Nerbun of Thrive On Challenge Sports

Forget about setting uncontrollable mid-level goals this season. Make these six commitments and build a transformational culture in your program that values people.

Commitment 1: Be authentic and vulnerable with your team.

Start the process to become a transformational coach AND open up with your team about the journey you are setting out on.  Buy “Transformational Leadership” by Joshua Medcalf and Jamie Gilbert or “Inside Out Coaching” by Joe Ehrmann. Don’t just read one of these books, but fully engage with the activities they outline to help you become a transformational coach. And then be authentic and vulnerable by sharing with your team (coaches and players) that you are setting out on a process to become not just a better coach, but a better person. Explain how transformational coaches use their platform to help mentor and serve the people in their care. By sharing your journey with them throughout the season they will gain a greater respect for you and be more more apt to forgive you when you do fall short and make mistakes as a leader. Model the transformation and openness you want to see in others!

Commitment 2: Read and journal together as a team.

Purchase a book and a journal for every member of your team, then commit 20-30 minutes at the end of every practice and game to read and write as a team. Jon Gordon says, “A team that reads together grows together.” Spend 5-10 minutes reading aloud and then have THEM discuss what they learned from the reading. If you need recommendations for books suitable for this exercise please contact me. After the team reads, everyone gets out their journals and does a success log or a what went well diary. Everyone writes down 5 things that they did well in their practice, 1 area of improvement, and 1 thing they learned. “10 Minute Toughness” by Jason Selk outlines the many benefits of this activity. We need to train our minds to see the good not just the bad, and THEN focus on learning and growth.

Commitment 3: Stop using conditioning as punishment.

Stop using running or other physical conditioning as punishment. Instead start to use it to develop mental toughness and create positive associations with conditioning. Mistakes should be embraced as part of the learning process, not reprimanded or punished. Conditioning our players hard and then getting them to execute when tired helps build mental toughness. One activity you can employ to change the negative connotations with conditioning is what I call a GUT CHECK. Put everyone on the line and have them run a sprint. Whoever comes in last stands on the sideline to cheer everyone else on. Continue until only one man is left standing. The team cheers and praises the people who run the most and give their best. You will even start to see other players continue to keep doing the sprint because they start to value  conditioning!

Commitment 4: Use boundaries and consequences to develop self-discipline.

The best discipline is self-discipline. People will not develop self-discipline if they never experience consequences for their actions. So stop yelling and using conditioning to discipline, it only motivates through fear. Henry Cloud’s book “Boundaries” discusses the importance of this principle to building healthy relationships. Motivate through love, not fear. Set a really high standard for their attitude, work ethic, and respect for others. When they fail to be striving towards or living up to that standard, encourage them. If they continue, let them know they have lost their opportunity to get better and send them home for the day. Instead of reinforcing a culture of entitlement, most of them will come to actually appreciate the boundaries and develop greater self-discipline.

Commitment 5: Give your players a voice at every opportunity.

Talk less, listen more. Use questions! Stop with the pre-game and halftime lectures going on about what they need to do! For example, instead of huddling together with your coaching staff at halftime and “making adjustments”, go ask your players what is going well and what adjustments they think need to be made. You can still help steer the focus of these conversations, and they will be much more engaged and committed if they are allowed to speak up.

Commitment 6: Stop chasing talent and start investing in grit.

Stop determining your lineup, playing time, or even cuts based on the talent level of a player. Start rewarding and valuing players with the traits you claim to believe to be the most important. Angela Duckworth’s book “Grit” discusses the naturalness bias. Research shows leaders believe they value strong workers over the naturally talented, but when it came to actually selecting people, they favored the “naturals”. What do you believe is most important for your team to reach your potential? Attitude, work ethic, respect, body language, selflessness? Start to favor with actions, not just words, the people who display a commitment to the process and the character traits you claim to value.

You can check out his Podcast “Coaching Culture” on iTunes.

Visit the coaching forum at or subscribe to his email list for more resources at thriveonchallenge.com

Dr. Cory Dobbs
Academy for Sport Leadership

Why is it that student-athletes fear leadership roles and responsibilities?How then can you change the outcome of inaction? Practice, practice, practice.  Just as you practice your offensive and defensive systems, you must practice your leadership system.

One of the deepest needs within people is belonging.  If you’re a coach you belong to the coaching “fraternity” or “sorority.”  And it feels good to belong.   These are your people, your friends, colleagues and confidants.  They think much like you do which makes it easy to be around one another.  There are coaching and administrator associations that hold annual events that you love to attend to be around others just like you.  Belonging is natural.

Your student-athletes—team captains or team leaders—want to belong too.  They seek an inner congruence for order, harmony, and peace with their teammates.  They too want the team to be like a fraternity or sorority.  They want to belong.  So when it comes time to lead, the typical team captain or team leader is afraid to do something that seems incongruent with their values and beliefs.  Their first thought is “Who am I to tell her she needs to stop doing that.”  They feel a real mental conflict.

Dr. Leon Festinger, a researcher and professor at Stanford University, coined the term “cognitive dissonance” to explain this mental conflict that the team leader feels.  Cognitive means the mind, the way we think.  Dissonance means conflict.  Cognitive dissonance literally means to have a mental conflict.

According to Festinger, and subsequently many other researchers, when an individual experiences cognitive dissonance they quickly search for a way to reduce the incongruence causing the dissonance.

The person with the conflict is motivated to reduce the inner turmoil in some manner.  For example, the thirty-five year old factory worker who smokes a pack a day on his breaks knows (doesn’t everyone?) that smoking is bad for you.  So to reduce the psychological tension he adopts the position, “My aunt lived to one-hundred and she smoked a pack a day so it must not be that bad for you.”  This cognitive maneuver reduces the internal tension caused by his actions—smoking—and his knowledge of facts—smoking is bad for you but it can’t be that bad if my aunt could smoke and live to one hundred.

Why is it that student-athletes fear leadership roles and responsibilities?  Simply put, when a student-athlete is asked to perform a peer-to-peer leadership action, it is, by default, inconsistent with his or her existing values, beliefs, and perceived skills.  This causes a conflict—dissonance—that inhibits the likelihood of the peer leader taking action.  The internal dialogue of “Who am I to do this” will generally rule the day.

How then can you change the outcome of inaction?  Practice, practice, practice.  Just as you practice your offensive and defensive systems, you must practice your leadership system.  To change internal beliefs is a challenge, it takes time and commitment.   Is it complicated?  Yes, of course!   But if you don’t make a deliberate effort to address the issue of cognitive dissonance, your team is vulnerable to the costs that come with the lack of team leadership.  «

To find out more about and order Sport Leadership Books authored by Dr. Dobbs including a Leader in Every Locker that this post was taken from, Click this link: The Academy for Sport Leadership Books

This article was written by Cory Dobbs, Ed.D., President of The Academy for Sport Leadership.  The Academy for Sport Leadership is a leading educational leadership training firm that uses sound educational principles, research, and learning theories to create leadership resources.  The academy has developed a coherent leadership development framework and programs covering the cognitive, psycho-motor, emotional and social dimensions of learning, thus addressing the dimensions necessary for healthy development and growth of student-athletes.

About the Author

Cory Dobbs is the founder and president of The Academy for Sport Leadership, a national leader in research‐based curriculum for coaches and student‐athletes. Dr. Dobbs is a college educator, a coach to successful coaches (helping coaches attain a higher level of success), and an accomplished human performance specialist whose expertise is in the field of leadership, team building, and creating a high‐performance culture in the arena of team sports. Cory blends social‐personality, psychology, and applied social psychology, which means he studies how people’s thoughts, behaviors, and preferences are influenced by both who they are and the situations they’re in. He uses Teamwork IntelligenceTM to help teams explore how the mix of perspectives brought by their individual members influences their work together.

About The Academy for Sport Leadership

The Academy for Sport Leadership is a leading educational leadership training firm that uses sound educational principles, research, and learning theories to create leadership resources.  The academy has developed a coherent leadership development framework and programs covering the cognitive, psycho-motor, emotional and social dimensions of learning, thus addressing the dimensions necessary for healthy development and growth of student-athletes.

The Academy for Sport Leadership’s underlying convictions are as follows: 1) the most important lessons of leadership are learned in real-life situations, 2) team leaders develop best through active practice, structured reflection, and feedback, 3) learning to lead is an on-going process in which guidance from a mentor coach helps facilitate learning and growth, and 4) leadership lessons learned in sport should transcend the game and assist student-athletes in developing the capacity to lead in today’s changing environment.

Many student-athletes are reluctant to take actions or to speak up or speak out for fear that their actions may be held against them by teammates. To neutralize such fears it’s in your best interest to create a psychologically safe environment.

By Cory Dobbs, Ed.D.

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be anxieties and risk involved in team learning until I put a few work teams at a Fortune 100 company under a microscope. To say the very least, what I observed was a wide-range of defensive and protective processes which ultimately closed off the team’s members from learning and instead created a variety of dysfunctions anchoring the team’s collective efforts in the harbor of mediocrity.

As a result of this work I decided to take a closer look at how student-athletes learn in a team setting, and in particular how the context influences the perceived risk involved in learning to lead one’s teammates. Upon closer inspection it became obvious that many of the risks involved in team learning in the corporate world are mirrored in the athletic world. Likewise, learning to lead in a team environment is risky business.

So, how do you get student-athletes to learn together? There are no simple answers. However, knowing that the context greatly affects learning is a step in the right direction if you’re serious about your players learning how to lead.

Leadership Development and Psychological Safety

When a student-athlete takes on a leadership role it’s important to understand that he or she will learn primarily through trial and error (which is why I firmly believe in deliberate practice—scrimmage—as a way to reduce perceived risks). If a student is learning physical geography he or she will learn in private with no one else aware of his or her mistakes. However, learning to lead in a team setting requires learning by trial and error in interpersonal interactions. Learning this way is certainly not learning in private and the consequences of actions always involve one’s teammates. Therefore, team leaders perceive risk in appearing ignorant and or incompetent in front of their peers.

Because most student-athletes have little experience at leading, which includes making mistakes in front of teammates, such fears as embarrassment and rejection are always present. And many student-athletes are reluctant to take actions or to speak up or speak out for fear that their actions may be held against them by teammates. To neutralize such fears it’s in your best interest to create a psychologically safe environment.

Let’s start with what I mean by psychological safety. It is a shared belief by all team members that the team is an environment where everyone has a sense of confidence that others will not embarrass, disrespect, disregard, or punish someone for taking action or speaking up or speaking out. All members understand that a supportive learning environment is necessary to build a psychologically safe team context.

The central idea is that a psychologically safe team environment will produce higher performing team learning and team leadership. Expressed as a formula it looks like this:

At the heart of the growth of a team leader is the leader as a learner, the learning process, and the context which together form the cornerstone of leadership development. Always keep in mind that the team leader is engaging in learning a new mind-set as well as a new skill-set. That is, the student-athlete as a team leader is undergoing a tremendous transformation and that is why creating a psychologically safe environment is necessary.

Creating a Psychologically Safe Learning Environment

Years ago, during a seminar the late Peter Drucker asked an elite group of executives “How many of you have deadwood in your organization?” referring to those employees that had retired on the job. The hands of every one of the high-profile CEOs went skyward. He then asked “Were they that way when you brought them into your organization?” The implication was obvious, if they were then the leader was at fault for hiring them, and if they weren’t then something inside the organization “caused” the employee to basically give up on improving and become organizational deadwood. The point is that the context has a much more profound effect on how people behave than most leaders
realize.

The question, then, is what can you do to create a psychologically safe environment for team leaders learning to lead? The first step is to understand your team environment as it is and how it interacts with the internal achievement drive of your team leaders. To do this, use the model below.

Hopefully the matrix above can provide a window into your current team context and how it is affecting the development of your team leaders. Psychological safety is an important component of creating an effective learning space for you and your team. The purpose of this brief article is to provide an introduction into the practice of developing a team leader’s capacity to lead through the process of team learning. When you involve all members of the team in the learning of leadership you’re more likely to create an effective learning environment.

Let me issue a quick reminder that leadership is a social influence process in which team leaders work to motivate or persuade teammates to achieve specific individual and team goals. As such, the norms, beliefs, and values that emerge from team member interactions will create team dynamics that will influence the social structure and social processes that will either enhance or inhibit team learning. Your goal as the chief architect of the environment should be to create a psychologically safe learning zone.

Ultimately, you have more to do with a team leader’s learning to lead—or not learning—than you probably thought you did. If you’re not growing team leaders, then it’s likely the problem is not the seed, it’s the soil.

To find out more about and order Sport Leadership Books authored by Dr. Dobbs including Coaching for Leadership, click this link: The Academy for Sport Leadership Books

About the Author

A former basketball coach, Cory’s coaching background includes experience at the NCAA DII, NJCAA, and high school levels of competition. While coaching, he researched and developed the transformative Becoming a Team Leader program for student-athletes. Cory has worked with professional athletes, collegiate athletic programs and high schools teaching leadership as a part of the sports experience and education process. Cory cut his teeth as a corporate leader with Fortune 500 member, The Dial Corp. As a consultant and trainer Dr. Dobbs has worked with such organizations as American Express, Honeywell, and Avnet.

Cory has taught a variety of courses on leadership and change for the following universities:

Northern Arizona University (Graduate Schools of Business and Education)

Ohio University (Graduate School of Education / Management and Leadership in Sport)

Grand Canyon University (Sports Marketing and Sports Management in the Colangelo School of Sports Business)

Visit www.corydobbs.com to read Cory’s leadership blog.