This post is also found on The Coaches Toolbox, a collection of resources for coaches of all sports

By Cory Dobbs, Ed.D.

“A team is not just a collection of individuals.  When everyone clicks into place, a team is truly a community, a tightly knit fellowship.” 

Many coaches are expert tacticians, strategists, and teachers of techniques.   Few are adept at building teams.  I mean high-performing teams.  Think Seal Team Six.  The elite fighting force, the team that captured Osama Bin Laden.  Sure, your team may master an offense or a defense, but it’s a fact that most teams don’t reach an elite level of teamwork.  To do so requires a deliberate and intense effort to building the team.  As a researcher I’ve studied hundreds of teams and can only conclude few teams, won-loss records aside, ever achieve an elite level.  Study after study of elite teams, like Seal Team Six, continue to reveal it’s not the personnel but processes that lead to an elite level team.

Take a moment and re-read the quote above.  I’ve purposefully left off the name of the author.  I did so out of respect for his work, but I do find this quote to be lacking in terms of action-ability.   Most coaches and players unknowingly live by a “click or clash” framework of relationship building.  That is, some people just click together while others clash with one another.  And it’s rarely explicit, but very implicit—teammates prefer to go along to get along.  Not in elite teams.

At its most dynamic level a team is a system, a network of interdependent components that work together to try to accomplish the aim of the system architects.  This differs from the most basic level of a team as a collection of players.  When the process of team building becomes more strategic, the calculus changes.  A laissez-faire approach changes to a more direct and deliberate approach.  Relationship building becomes the central focus.  Relationship is everything.  When you see the process of team building as social system, then the integrity of every interpersonal interaction is essential to developing an intensive teaming capability.

I’ve uncovered, through wide-ranging research and practice, twenty principles and concepts and isolated eight “roles” that are necessary for building elite teams.  Yes, I’ve cracked the code to building high-performance teams.  High-performing teams make deliberate teamwork their focus.

The Teamwork Intelligence approach is a disciplined way of thinking about and building a high-performing team; it involves discussing teamwork as both a system and a set of processes.  This allows us to explore the context in which teamwork occurs, the characteristics of the coaches and players, individual and team values, experience, the timing of events, the history in which teamwork is embedded, and how teamwork intelligence plays a role in individual and collective successes and failures.   Teamwork intelligence delves into team work as a process and as a way to understand the person (both players and coaches) embedded within a system.

To think about teamwork as a system, we need to consider the inputs, such as training for teamwork intelligence, the process, which we can describe as the system and the context in which the players and coaches interact, and the outcomes, which are the levels of motivation, performance, and well-being of players and coaches.   To leverage the process of teamwork intelligence I have designed five building blocks that must be operationalized:  (1) the four dimensions of team building and the associated eight roles of teamwork; (2) the three mindsets of a team player; (3) the three layers of a team player; (4) the five core concerns of every team member, and (5) the five forces of performance-enhancing relationships.  By optimizing these five components—the teamwork intelligence system—we are able to enhance each individual’s vital force and, in turn, the collective force of the team.

SO, WHAT IS TEAMWORK INTELLIGENCE?                   

Teamwork Intelligence is the purposeful and intentional relational process of team members together raising one another to higher levels of motivation, collaboration, compassion, and performance.  It’s deceptively simple: in order to build a high-performing team you have to create the conditions for team members to commit and unify—to coalesce into a single organism.  Such oneness is not inevitable; it is forged methodically and deliberately.
WHY IS TEAMWORK INTELLIGENCE THE SMART THING TO DO?

A significant aspect of teamwork intelligence is knowing the expectations one should have of one’s teammates.  One of the most significant expectations is that of high-level ownership with the purpose of each player investing in the development of a high-performing team.  Through expectations and collective achievements, identification, loyalty, and trust are built.  The goal and expected outcome is the development of the team’s full potential.

Extreme Ownership is a central concept of Teamwork Intelligence.  Teamwork Intelligence is not only about teaching student-athletes how to comply with a set of rules and procedures; it is about recognizing the profound difference between compliance-based behavior and values-based performance.  Extreme Ownership is about creating a culture in which every team member is committed to performance excellence and team member wellness based on personal commitment to the best interests of the team.  Extreme Ownership occurs when student-athletes own their personal learning and performance as well as team learning and performance.

Teamwork Intelligence generates higher levels of autonomy, extra effort, commitment, performance, and satisfaction.  High performance is what the student-athlete wants to do, not because it brings personal glory, but because they feel a sense of extreme ownership of the team.  The extreme owner is all in as a team player and willingly goes all out for the team.

I’ve seen enough to validate the claim that knowing what to do can lead to higher levels of doing.  However, I’ve also observed far too frequently a high degree of learned helplessness.  Student-athletes have, for the most part, grown up in a sport system in which they prefer to wait for the coach to take corrective action, to “instill” motive and values, and basically avoid taking responsibility for the building of the team.  This is why elite teams are emphatic about deliberately building a team and insistent on teamwork intelligence.

Teamwork Intelligence provides a framework for seeing interrelationships of the elements of the team system rather than static “snapshots” that tend to distort the differences between a mediocre team and a high-performing team.   Teamwork Intelligence provides a set of principles and includes a set of specific tools and techniques (such as role clarification provided by The Eight Roles of Teamwork) for building a high-performance team.  Investing in the development of relationships will pay off.

Okay, so are you willing to invest time, energy, and resources into developing an elite team?  If so, get started as soon as possible.   Explore the principles and practices The Academy for Sport Leadership has discovered and developed and teach in our Teamwork Intelligence Workshop.

 

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 Cory Dobbs, Ed.D.

Cory Dobbs is the founder of The Academy for Sport Leadership and a nationally recognized thought leader in the areas of leadership and team building.  Cory is an accomplished researcher of human experience. Cory engages in naturalistic inquiry seeking in-depth understanding of social phenomena within their natural setting.

A former basketball coach, Cory’s coaching background includes experience at the NCAA DII, NJCAA, and high school levels of competition.  After a decade of research and development Cory unleashed the groundbreaking Teamwork Intelligence program for student-athletics. Teamwork Intelligence illuminates the process of designing an elite team by using the 20 principles and concepts along with the 8 roles of a team player he’s uncovered while performing research.

Cory has worked with professional athletes, collegiate athletic programs, and high schools teaching leadership and team building as a part of the sports experience and education process.  As a consultant and trainer Dr. Dobbs has worked with Fortune 500 organizations such as American Express, Honeywell, and Avnet, as well as medium and small businesses.

Dr. Dobbs has taught leadership and organizational change at Northern Arizona University, Ohio University, and Grand Canyon University.

Coach Zak Boisvert has put together some notes on the coaching philosophy of Alabama Football Coach Nick Saban. I hope the notes can have a positive impact on your program. All coaches can learn something, regardless that he coaches a different sport.

PROCESS

“We’re not going to talk about what we’re going to accomplish, we’re going to talk about how we’re going to do it.”

“We don’t talk about winning championships, we talk about being champions.”

-“I’m tired of hearing all this talk from people who don’t understand the process of hard work—like little kids in the back seat asking ‘Are we there yet?’ Get where you’re going 1 mile-marker at a time.”

-“The scoreboard has nothing to do with the process. Each possession you look across at the opponent and commit yourself to dominate that person. It’s about individuals dominating the individuals they’re playing against. If you can do this…if you can focus on the one possession and wipe out the distractions…then you will be satisfied with the result.”

-“He says ‘the grind’ a lot. The things you have to do so you can do what you want to do. Like play for the national championship. All the workouts. Spring ball. All the practices, summer workouts, and things like that.” –Alabama LB E. Anders

-“Focus on the play like it has a history and a life of its own.”

-“Success doesn’t come from pie-in-the-sky thinking. It’s the result of consciously doing something each day that will add to your overall excellence.”

-There’s no mention of titles. Instead, his message has been that the way to win a championship is to concentrate on what you’re doing today, and try to build on that tomorrow.

-“It’s not the end result. Don’t think about winning the SEC Championship. Don’t think about the national championship. Think about what you needed to do in this drill, on this play, in this moment.

That’s the process: Let’s think about what we can do today, the task at hand.”

-“If you don’t get result-oriented with the kids, you can focus on the things in the process that are important to them being successful.”

DARE TO BE GREAT:

-“Being the absolute best isn’t natural. You must bend your entire life around being great. Beat the urge to rest after you’ve achieved a taste of success.”

-“Once you get good, you need a total disposition about being better than good. Now the challenge is to be the best and that’s a never-ending process.”

CULTURE:

“We don’t have one individual on our team that can make our team great, but we can have one individual who could destroy the team chemistry by making bad decisions and destroy all the things we’re talking about.”

-“Team chemistry begins to surface in the summer. True leaders start to emerge. You start to see the core buy-in that everybody has in terms of how they go about what they do. For the first time, the responsibility becomes theirs instead of somebody else’s. You start to see what the team might be.”

-“He does an outstanding job of getting everybody on the same page and making sure that they understand ‘Look, you’re going to buy in or you’re going to become irrelevant.”

-“You’ve got to be responsible and accountable and be able to do your job. There’s a way you have to do it in terms of the effort, the toughness and the intangibles and dependability you have and discipline you have in carrying out your responsibility. And I, quite frankly, think when you have a critical mass of players on your team that think like that, they don’t really want other guys that don’t think that way to be out there with them.”

Five Day-to-Day Goals

1) Respect and trust your teammates
2) Have a positive impact on someone else
3) Dominate your opponent
4) Be responsible
5) Act like a champion

PARABLES:

“If I put a 2-by-4 on the ground and asked you to walk across it, how many of you guys could do that? You could all do it, because you’d focus on the board. But what if I took the same 2-by-4 and it put it 10 stories up, stretched between 2 buildings? Then it’s hard to focus on the board, because you’re focused on your fear of falling. Focus on your goals. Don’t be distracted by your fears. Concentrate on the 2-by-4 and we’ll get it done.”

“Discipline is not punishment. Discipline is changing someone’s behavior.”

Four Components of Leadership

Engage: You HAVE to make it about them because they don’t see it like we do. Get over it, youth have changed.

Inspire: Why does every coach think that everyone wants to be great? Human condition is to survive, to be average. IT IS SPECIAL TO WANT TO BE GREAT. You cannot expect your kids to want to be great. We’ve had success here at Alabama because we don’t assume people want to be great and we’ve put a system in place that makes it uncomfortable unless they’re choosing the path that will make them great. We don’t assume they will do it on their own. It’s up to us to inspire/put a system in place to make people want it.

Influence: Thoughts, Habits, Priorities. Influence these 3 (IN THAT ORDER!)

Impact: How do we impact them? How do they impact each other? Peer intervention + peer pressure.

“Nick has unique ability to make everyone in the building single-minded in purpose. There’s nobody in there that isn’t doing something to try to win.” –Bill Belichick

“Everything for us goes back to trust and respect. Trust and respect the principles of organization, trust and respect each other.”

“He puts a structure in place that covers all areas from ankle-wrappers to play-callers. Everyone is held accountable. It’s a system where people know there’s a standard, an expectation that you’re there to meet.” –Major Applewhite

“You have to challenge people to do things a certain way and it may be more than what they expect from themselves. You have to re-enforce positive performance when they do it, but you also have to confront them to do it correctly if they don’t do it that way. And there’s a balance in there.”

SELF-DISCIPLINE:

“Everything you do, everything you have, everything you become is ultimately the result of the choices you have made. You have the power to direct your life. How will you use it? What’s your choice?”

You have to have discipline to do things on your own. There’s not always going to be someone to make you do it. You have to have discipline to do it yourself.”

MOTIVATION

“I don’t care what you did yesterday. If you’re happy with that, you have bigger problems.”

MENTAL TOUGHNESS

“Mental toughness is a perseverance that you have when you can make yourself do something that you really don’t feel like doing. You don’t really feel like getting up, but you get up. You don’t feel like practicing today, but you practice. And, even in difficult circumstances and difficult surroundings, you can stay focused on what you need to stay focused on. So it really is a mental discipline to be able to
stick within whatever circumstance you are in and continue to persevere at a high level and not let other circumstance affect how you perform.”

“I will not allow my players to put their hand on their knees or show in their faces they are tired going into the fourth quarter. If they do, they are going to get their butts whipped. If they do that, they are showing the other team they can be beat.”

“The mental toughness training was geared toward showing players that their minds were as important to football success as their bodies.”

“Every day you come to practice, you get better or you get worse. You’re not going to stay the same and it’s all going to start with how you think. How you think will determine the mental intensity you play with. Without that mental intensity, we cannot improve.

“There are 3 intangibles that take no athletic ability that aids a player in being responsible for his own self-determination. Those 3 intangibles take the most time in coaching in my opinion. Those intangibles are effort, toughness, and assignment.”

“I think the things that it takes to be successful are the same regardless, whether it’s passion, commitment, hard work, investing your time in the right things, perseverance, pride in performance, how you think in a positive and negative way, the discipline you have personally—you have to make choices in your decisions.”

MISCELLANEOUS:

“He doesn’t obsess over national championships, he obsesses over trying to push people to be better. He thinks if he can do that, the wins will come.”

“You don’t dominate someone the first play, you do it the 70th play. You need to sustain.”

“Make all your decisions based on winning.” (#1 thing Saban learned from Chuck Knoll)

Locker room sign: “Don’t Come Back Until You’ve Improved”

“Be relentless in the pursuit of your goal and resilient in the face of bad luck and adversity.”

“The one thing our program is based upon is finishing. Finish games. Finish your reps. Finish your running. Finish practice strong. Finish the fourth quarter.” –Alabama OL Will Vlachos

“Don’t look at the scoreboard. Whether you’re ahead or behind shouldn’t affect how you participate.”

“Teaching is the ability to inspire learning.”

This article and other helpful coaching tools can be found at Coach Dawn Writes

By Dawn Redd-Kelly, Head Volleyball Coach at Beloit College.

There is always a huge gap between the birth of a dream and the achievement of that dream.
–Put Your Dream To The Test

Every team starts out the year with high goals…things they’d like to have accomplished by season’s end.  What every team does not have is the desire, tenacity, and motivation to keep pursuing the goal when (cliché alert!) the going gets tough.  Let’s discuss how to keep our teams and our athletes on track in this third of a three-part series (click here to read parts one and two) while examining the last five questions from the book, Put Your Dream To The Test by John Maxwell.  I believe that guiding them through this goal setting process can help them to accomplish individual and team goals put them on the path to having a successful season.

The People Question:  Have I Included the People I Need to Realize My Dream?
“Convincing others of the significance of your dream can happen only if you are convinced of the significance of your dream.”  This question is for people who need to build a team around them in order to be successful, but our athletes come with a ready-made team!  Now all you’ve got to do is remind them that the goal can only be accomplished through daily work.  Everyone’s fired up at the beginning of the season, but what about when you’ve suffered a heartbreaking loss, or midterms are kicking their butts, or it’s just harder than they thought?  That’s when we can remind them that they’re not alone and that they’re in it together.

The Cost Question:  Am I Willing to Pay the Price for My Dream?
“All dreams are outside our comfort zone.  Leaving that zone is a price we must pay to achieve them.”  What’s the price, you ask?  Criticism: what if one of your players thinks that she can be in the WNBA and has decided to make that one of her goals?  When she tells people, they may try to dissuade her from pursuing that goal…not to be mean or negative, but in protecting her feelings.  Fear: using our same example, that’s a big out-of-her-comfort-zone goal…and it’s scary.  If she’s not willing to work through being afraid that she’s bitten off more than she can chew, then she should get a smaller goal.  Hard work: athletics is hard work on its own.  Adding a big, huge goal heaps a whole lot more work to their plate…are they willing to pay that price?

The Tenacity Question:  Am I Moving Closer to My Dream?
“The only guarantee for failure is to stop trying.”  Your athletes have to be finishers, not just starters.  It’s really that simple.  As Dory from Finding Nemo says, “just keep swimming.”  Don’t quit, don’t give up.  As long as they keep putting in work everyday, their goals are getting closer and more real.

The Fulfillment Question:  Does Working Toward My Dream Bring Satisfaction?
“If you want the pursuit of your dream to be sustainable, it needs to bring you satisfaction.”  Maxwell says that there’s a gap between stating the goal and achieving the goal…and it only gets bigger with a larger goal.  If your athletes appreciate the process of working toward a goal, they will discover how tough they are.  And that toughness will serve them well and keep them from wavering.

The Significance Question:  Does My Dream Benefit Others?
“Start doing what is necessary; then do what is possible; and suddenly, you are doing the impossible.” I think the answer to this question is two-fold.  For the individual, the team will benefit from their goals.  For the team, future teams will benefit from the current team’s goals.  And I just love this quotation!  If our athletes and teams just do what is necessary…at least they’re working toward the goal.  What is necessary?  Coming to practice and working hard, supporting their teammates, and giving their all in each and every drill at each and every practice.  And if they do what is possible, then they’ll challenge themselves…because how do they know what they’re capable of or what is possible for them if they don’t try new things?  If they do what is possible everyday, all of a sudden those things that they thought were impossible are possible.  And they just keep pushing the envelope and keep getting better and those goals are getting closer and closer.

That’s the end of our goal setting series and I hope you found at least one thing that you can put into action with your team right away.  Every team and every person will have different goals, but we coaches can have one plan to guide them along that goal setting process.

 

 

Are you tired of walking into practice and seeing lackluster effort from your players?  Have you had it with trying to get your female athletes to care about the team as much as you do??

Click here to find out more about Coach Dawn’s eBook: Motivating Female Athletes

Comes with a FREE PowerPoint presentation called Guarantee Your Success: Using John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success To Increase Your Team’s Cohesion.

The following post is courtesy of Coach Tom Houser.  

Coach Houser is currently sixth all-time in career coaching victories in Virginia with a career record of 267-47. He has been coaching travel volleyball since 1991, and his teams have qualified for Jr Nationals 4 of the past 11 years. He is the owner of STAR Volleyball Services LLC which conducts numerous clinics around the country.  Click the link CoachHouser.com to gain access to more valuable coaching tools. You can also contact Coach Houser at [email protected]

In this post Coach Houser is sharing his answer to a question he received from another coach. The topic is “Recruiting Videos”

Question:

I coach club and high school in Ohio and stumbled across your website.   So I bought your ebooks.  Wow, they’re amazing! I really appreciate them!

Each season, I offer to help my players with recruiting videos, if they want them. So far, I don’t like the way that they’ve turned out. My husband has great editing skills, so that is not the problem.

Mostly, I am not sure what a great recruiting video looks like. I used guidelines from a well-respected college coach, but I am not sure that it creates a stellar introduction of the player. Another difficulty is that the players that I help are often not stellar. I do think that they can play somewhere, but they are not necessarily impressive (unless you only watch them in a highlight reel).

Can you please share some videos with me and offer any more thoughts/suggestions?

 

Answer:

Bottom line in regards to a skills video:  You want the person watching to see the athlete’s athleticism, skill and potential.  Your goal is for the person watching to WANT to keep watching, to meet this athlete and see her play in person. 

That’s all a good video is.   There is no “this is the way!!” carved in stone.  Therefore, this article isn’t going to be about what Coach Houser prefers a skills video to be.  

In my career, I have helped produce dozens of skills videos and have watched maybe 1000.  When watching, I can usually discern the volleyball skills of the person in the first few minutes, regardless of the money the parents spent on it.  If the athlete who is working with you doesn’t have the skills or the athleticism to play at the next level, then we create the best video we can, and distribute it.  There’s nothing else we can do, or should do.  

I didn’t used to be able to evaluate talent very quickly.  But, because I’ve coached a lot of National level club teams, I have watched a lot of video of prospective team members.  I’ve also sat in the bleachers watching D1 volleyball for 4 years.  So, now every time I see a skills video, I usually can answer the following pretty quickly and reliably: “Could she make my club national level club team? Could she help D3 Local College?  Could she help Big University?”  The college coaches who view videos probably have about the same coaching experience as I do, or more.  

Now Let’s Talk About DON’Ts!!!  

I recommend that you don’t include in your video:

* anything that a good JV player could do.  If I see too much of that, I wouldn’t even be interested in her for my 15’s team.  A few college coaches may stop watching the video at that point.  Yikes!

* And don’t include rep after rep of the same skill, even if those reps are impressive.  The coach is encouraged to fast forward.  I do.  

Next:  don’t try to over-hype the person.  So, there’s no need for a long Hollywood intro. Get to her skills!  Let her athleticism do the hyping! ☺   In fact, the more slow motion, special effects, etc. there is on a tape, the more I’m thinking, “Are they trying to trick me?”  The more slick the tape is, the wearier I become.  And impatient.  Please:  We want to see the athlete, not all that mess.

Never try to deceive the person watching the video.  For example, I’ve known coaches:

* to lower the net.  

* video from as close to the floor as possible, to try to make the player look taller *sigh*
* ask players to put on makeup, curl their hair, wear smaller clothes, etc. to make them more appealing. 

Really?  College and club coaches are aware of these tricks, and, if they feel that they’re being deceived, may just stop the video and go on to the next one.  Seriously, if a coach can’t trust a family during the recruiting process, won’t that practice continue if she’s on the team??  In other words, if we see that the athlete has been raised in an atmosphere of deception, then why would we believe that won’t continue?

The editor of the video may also try to pick clips vs. very weak opponents hoping that’ll make the athlete look better.  He may even try to hide/crop the opponents from the viewer.  Another *sigh*.  The coach watching the video will notice that the opponents aren’t making plays, thus are a weak team.  So, just pick video where the athlete is playing well.  And if the opponent happens to be pretty good, that’s even better!!

Again, let her athleticism and skill do the talking!   And if she doesn’t have enough skill/athleticism to play at OSU, OU, Marietta, etc., then that’s the way it goes.  We can’t all be members of the college team that we have dreamed of, just like we can’t all be on American Idol.  

OK, You Wanted To See A Few Videos!    

You asked for videos:  

* Here is video from a girl in Wisconsin:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J5DLyj4Guo  I think you’ll like the first dig and the first hit.  Those got my attention.  I had to watch more.  

* Here is Bre Lockhart’s video.  She’s from Roanoke, and is now a freshman playing D3.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92hqiF_oh34  The dad and I created much of the footage together, then he did all the editing.  

* I received this yesterday from the mom of a girl who I’m training.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7L2EQ_iZ_E&feature=youtu.be   I had some feedback for the mom.  

At any time while you’re watched these videos, did you get bored?  Do you say, “Come on.  Don’t do any more.  I’ve seen that.  Move on.  Now, show me something new!  Can you do X?  Can you do Y? or Z?”  Yep, some videos don’t ask enough of the athletes, so someone watching will be left wondering, “I wonder if she can do A & B?”  Now, what if you were the coach who had to watch 10 of these videos per day?  See what I mean? 

Finally:  Make the video quick, efficient and ethical.  Meanwhile ask the athlete to show every skill that she excels at!  Then, let it all work itself out.  I promise you that if she has “PACA,” college and club coaches will be in touch.  

What is PACA?  

P is Potential

A is Athleticism

C is Character

A is Academics

(These aren’t in any particular order.  I placed them in this order so that I’ve have an acronym that was easy to remember.)