Hello and welcome back to Brain in the Game. Brain in the Game is a podcast that's been specifically designed for athletes, coaches and parents who are out there looking to do their sport just that little bit smarter. I'm your host, Dave Diggle.
In this Episode 83, we're going to look at something that is really controversial when you're trying to create an organisation or a club or a group that's really efficient, effective, and responsive. That is, how do you build an effective leadership group? And why is it so important for the development of you, your team, and your athletes? Let's dive into this one.
The word leadership group often evokes a sense of dread or fear for the coach. In their mind, they're probably really resistant and not looking for a way to hand over control in any shape, manner, or form. The thoughts of a leadership group, handing over some control to your athletes can be quite scary. It's sometimes seen as a soft way of pandering to those athletes who may be a little bit allergic to hard work or don't really want to conform or comply with what you're trying to do. Maybe even for parents who want to get their talons into your coaching program. So as a coach, it can be quite a scary concept to even consider putting a leadership group in, let alone one that is designed specifically to challenge and grow.
So first, let's look at why you wouldn't want a leadership group. Okay, well, if you're 100% in full control and you're getting 100% of response from your athletes when you ask them to do something and you're getting 100% of the optimal results, you're winning absolutely everything and you're doing that without any casualties, then you know what? Then go ahead, you're good to go. You can switch this podcast off and probably start your own one. Or if you wouldn't want to look at a leadership group because you know what? It's just everything's working for you. You don't need to collaborate. You've got all the solutions, all the answers, everything that ever needs to happen in the dynamic that you've got, then again, you don't need to be here and your dictatorship is healthy and thriving and off you go. Okay, but seriously, we know none of those 100 percenters are realistic. We also know that none of those metrics are ever 100% successful.
And running a dictatorship, look, that's never really a great idea. There's always a coup out there somewhere, someone's trying to look to come and overtake. So none of those are ever really real strategies of long term or looking at creating a high performing environment. And the reality is you will need to collaborate and bring in a team to grow for optimisation if you are looking to perform and sustainably perform at a high level.
So we need to first understand why would you want a leadership group? What are the benefits of leadership groups over other strategies, other formats of building an efficient and effective team dynamic, even if you work in a sport that is an individual sport. Like myself, I came from a sport that I was a gymnast, so that is predominantly what you're trying to do is go out there and perform as an individual. You go as a team sometimes, but it's all about your individual result and often about your individual placing. But we would have definitely benefited from having a leadership group in our team. So is it really valued or is it valuable or is it a valid way of building that dynamic? Spoiler alert! Yes it is. So let's look at why. So let's look at who does a leadership group benefit. And let's start with that individual, that athlete, whether it's in a team environment or individual sport. So what does a leadership group do to benefit and grow that individual person?
Well, number one, it encourages communication skills. And sport can be institutionalising in a mindset often because... And particularly if you're coming from a young age sport, like I say, I was a gymnast, we start that sport at a very young age. So the institutionalisation becomes a part of what you do. You rock up, you do as you're told, and you don't question. From the get go. Think about Pink Floyd's Another Brick In The Wall, Part II. That should tell you everything about why institutionalisation doesn't really promote good communication. And if you're under the age of 50, I'll just pause here for a sec while you go and Google who the hell Pink Floyd are and what Another Brick In The Wall, Part II is. But seriously, communication skills can be incredibly well developed when you've got an environment that allows the athlete to communicate in a safe environment where they're going to be persecuted, they're not going to be judged, they're not going to be isolated or kicked out of that team for having an opinion.
Having an athlete who communicates with each other, internally with themselves, and even more importantly with you as the coach is a critical component to getting an efficient and an effective athlete's dynamic and growth. So whatever we can do as a coaching fraternity to get athletes to communicate better is a win in my book.
The second part of that is all about collaboration. Historically and necessarily, athletes are self centred. As we've said, that most of them, even if they're in a team environment are predominantly only focused on their progression, their development, and their results. So when you put highly competitive people in an environment that you as a coach are trying to teach, and they're not necessarily listening to you, what they're doing is they're thinking about the people in their team and thinking, How do I beat them? How do I do better than them? What if they're doing this? How do I do it better? What if they're doing that skill? How do I do that skill and another one? And they're looking at, How do I get selected? Or, How do I win this competition? It makes your messaging as a coach get diluted, or at least at the best, push to second or third place on the hierarchy of needs scale.
Collaboration, getting athletes to collaborate on something that is collective, again, is a great skillset for developing optimal communication and optimal coaching environment platform. And you will thank, you'll thank me and you'll thank that leadership group if you create a world where, if nothing else, they can communicate better with you and they're more collaborative with you, the information that you're sharing is way less resisted by them, then without a doubt, you're in front.
The third part is cause and effect, the actions or inactions. We don't see what we're not aware of. So if we as an individual, as a collective, as a species, if we don't know it's out there and we're impacting it, it's often too late before we realise that we can do something about it. Now, whatever your stance on global warming is, I think that's a great example. If we had been aware of what we were doing a long time ago, then we probably wouldn't have been where we are right now. Think of that on a much smaller scale inside your organisation, your sporting group, your team, whatever that is. If you've got an athlete who is completely unaware of the way that they're behaving and what that causes to the team dynamic, and it's not going to get any better if we don't raise it with them, then often that becomes an environment that becomes hostile rather than developmental.
We think about athletes as I say, they're incredibly self centred. They're out there to try and be the best at what they do. So they're not necessarily aware of what's going on around them. If it doesn't necessarily impact them straight away, or they're not aware that it actually impacts them straight away. So being part of a leadership group where other people's opinions, other people's observations are being discussed, where you can't unhear what you hear. What you do with that information is one thing, but you can't unhear it. So being part of that, hearing other people's input, hearing other people's opinions, hearing other people's experiences does give you different context. Now, we're looking at this from one aspect of the detrimental aspect of that, but we can also look at that from the other side of the snowball going down the mountain. As those of you who've listened to me before is, how do we increase the efficiency and the effectiveness and the results of something that is working? Well, recognition and reward. That creates a compounding effect of what's going on, which creates a bigger mass and then faster momentum. So being part of a leadership group, recognising what is working that's not just results orientated at a competition or a game, allows us to invest time, effort, and focus much, much, much earlier.
Speaking of ownership and responsibility, we are way more invested in something that we feel is relevant to us. So if we own it, we're more likely to invest in it. We're more likely to follow that process. And again, think about buying a house. If it's your home, you're way more likely to spend money on beautifying that home or making those repairs or whatever you need to do if you go, Well, I'm going to get a return on this. If you're a renter, you're less likely to invest time, effort, and money into something that somebody else is going to be benefiting from. So ownership, also as an individual athlete, comes from being a part of this process. If you're sitting down and you're discussing about the best ways to structure training sessions, the best ways to communicate, the best times of day to do strength and conditioning, to skills or competition trials or whatever that is, and you're looking, Well, this works best for us as a group. There's nobody else in the gym. Or, You know what? There's a huge amount of people in the gym. It's a great opportunity for us to do competition environment training because there's a lot going on. There's distractions. And you're part of that process and you're going to own that outcome way better. You're way more bought in and resilient to things that are challenging of you.
The next one is connection. Again, we're feeding the athlete environment at the moment. We'll get to the rest of everybody else in a moment, but we're feeding this individual athlete. Connection with people that you train with all the time and you're in competition with all the time. This can be incredibly isolating for an athlete who doesn't know necessarily how to be connected, doesn't know how to collaborate, communicate, take ownership and responsibility for their environment. All of these things are a domino that feeds into each other and they're not connected with the rest of their team, then they're less likely to be listening to your information as a coach. Their environment isn't conducive of growth, of resilience, of sustainability. So they're in that fight or flight. They're thinking, Who's going to take my position? How do I beat these people? Rather than, What's the best version of me? How do I grow as an individual? When I'm in student mode and I'm learning something, I'm pushing boundaries, trying new things. Then I need to be in a place where I feel, and I use that word really cautiously, I feel comfortable. If I'm in an environment where I am not connected with anybody else, I feel isolated, I feel alone, then our learning mechanism is impacted negatively. Those aspects all feed into each other. The last part of this individual benefit is trust. Now, speaking about skill acquisition, skill retention, skill optimisation, that learning environment for athletes, we know to take it from our prefrontal cortex and put it into our subconscious, that place of flow, the window that it travels through is trust. And if we're in an environment that we don't trust, we're less likely to delegate that skill, that routine, that performance, from overthinking it to our subconscious and trusting it. Being part of a leadership group where you feel that you've got that ownership, you feel you've got that contribution, you're in an environment that you've helped build, you're way more receptive to taking that information, that skill, that process, that routine and going, I've got this. I know it feels a certain way. And again, I say that word 'feel' really, really cautiously. But it is a term that we need to be aware of.
So from an individual athlete's perspective, we want to build good communication, collaboration, cause and effect, ownership, responsibility, connection, and ultimately, trust.
And when we look at it from a team dynamic, so not the individual, but the whole collective, those of you who've heard me talk about Bruce Tuckman's human group dynamic modeling, forming, storming, norming, and performing, it's a critical component to how we get efficient and effective team dynamics. So if you are in a team orientated sport and you're not focusing on the forming, storming, norming, and performing dynamic, then you probably find yourself in a peak and valley, peak and valley model of performance with your team. Some weeks they go out and they do really, really well. Other weeks they go out and it all falls to crap. Then they go out and they rally and they do really, really well, and then they fall off the cliff again. That's often because that team isn't necessarily working cohesively. Having a leadership group can help in that formation process, going from that forming to storming when you fall off the cliff and you're going from initially, I'm doing really, really well. Everyone's doing everything that we put this team together. And to a coach this is frustrating.
I've watched many, many teams and been part of team selection processes where the coach has gone, Right, these are the people I want in this team this week. They'll go to the first training session, and they look like this team has just gelled instantly. And then just before game day, it all falls apart. There's a fracture in the process, the communication modeling, they're missing key skills or key plays. And there's a coach again, What the hell is going on? Well, they've gone into storming phase. Everyone's trying to work out as the emotions rise. Well, what's my position? What am I going to do? How does this best benefit for me? So that forming storming cycle becomes how you do everything.
Now, there's lots of teams I've worked in where that forming storming cycle is a self preservation mechanism that, if I'm really honest with you, is predominantly caused by the coach's interaction with the team. And as a former coach, I've been guilty of this too. As a former coach, I actually started to just dictate how things were. No, no, no, guys, this is not working. What we need to do is A, B, C, and D. Let's not deviate from that. Everyone do as you're told. I know what I'm doing. Let's just do that. And those of you are coaches, listen to this, go, Yeah, yeah, of course. I'm the coach. I need to know what's going on. I need to be the one in control. Remember we talked about before, it's going to be my way. I've got this dictatorship, it works. That's what you guys pay me for. But the reality is self preservation, particularly in high performing people, is way more dominant than trust in an old process that somebody else is selling.
So the team dynamic of having a leadership group is critical. Because again, if we go back to some of those individual things, there's ownership, there's responsibility, there's cause and effect, there's collaboration, there's communication, there's connection, and there's this sense of building trust. All of those components that are relevant for an individual are relevant for a team. That team DNA is absolutely critical if we're going to go out there and perform in a way that keeps us at our peak. We're not playing a roller coaster. We're constantly growing because we have this idea of, Hey, I know what we're doing. We're all collectively here.
Now, the other thing about being a team dynamic is as much as a coach will want to be out there as orchestrated, has got the team together and said, This is our gameplay, either individually, if you're in individual sport, or collectively, you're in the team sport. Look, the reality is very rarely does a coach run out on the field and actually play the game. You have to rely on your peers that are out there with you. So if part of your decision making, your communication modeling messages are coming from those within that team in that moment, then you're way more likely as a team to cohesively listen and apply. Particularly if something's not working. If you get out there and the strategy that you'd preemptively built doesn't work for whatever reason, maybe the opposition are playing in a different way, maybe the conditions are different. You plan for a bright, sunny day and all of a sudden there's high winds and it's bucketing down with rain, and you have to make adjustments in the moment. Hearing it from the coach on the sideline means that it then needs to be received by the whole team, communicated within the whole team, and then they're going out there blind.
No one is out there orchestrating. Everyone's got their own ideas and there's a heightened sense of fear and anxiety because in the moment you're changing the plan. If you've got people on the inside who are helping you change that, who you can listen to, they're out there with you, they're living it, you're way more receptive to that. As I say, the propensity as a coach is to dictate for all athletes and teams to do the DNA the way they design it. But it has to be a collaboration and DNA is formed – when I'm talking about DNA, I'm not talking about the genetics, I'm talking about the performance identity. When a team forms their DNA, this is the team we are, this is how we communicate, this is how we play, this is how we deal with things when they don't work, this is how we get ourselves back on track. That needs to be formed from the inside, not the outside. So having a leadership group goes a long way towards creating that and integrating it under pressure.
Okay, so let's look at how does this benefit the coach and the coaching staff. When working with anyone, it doesn't matter how good we are at what we do as a coach, we need to have our concepts taken and integrated. There needs to be some form of collaboration. There needs to be some form of application to what we're communicating. And the reality is, often, us as coaches come from a different era than our players. Not all the time, but often. The head coach or the person making the biggest decisions is often quite a few years older than the athletes that they are trying to lead and guide and move forward. When you think about it from a context of communication. Now, I'm an adult, for those of you who don't know me, haven't seen, I like to think most of the time I'm an adult. I have three children and one of them he's got his own life, he's out there, he's married. My next child down, she's at university and my youngest one is still in high school. There's a gap between all of them and the way that each one of them, even though they've all grown up in the same household with the same parents with the same influences, they communicate differently. Part of that is their own unique spice of who they are and what's important to them and the way they focus.
One of them is a boy, two of them are girls. There's always those dynamics. But there's also generational gap. There's five years in between each one of my children, and that's done on purpose, and that's a whole different podcast. But there's five years in between, and it's really interesting when you listen to the language patterns that each of them have, and the influences that were around in that time, those are the things that they connect to. When I'm talking to my son, who, as I say, he's married and he's out with his wife on their own, they've got their own place and they're doing their own thing. My communication model is incredibly different with him than it is with my youngest daughter, who's still in high school. Irrespective of the fact they had the same influences growing up. So as a coach, we can sometimes think that we know exactly how to communicate with each one of our athletes. But the reality is there's so many influences on them that we're just not aware of. As a coach, we get to see that athlete when they come training, when they go to competition, sometimes we travel with them, sometimes we see them outside for organisational events, but we don't see them often hanging out with their friends or being at home when they're in the non athlete mode and communicating those things.
But those times when their walls are down and they're communicating freely, that's a real true indication of the way that they truly communicate. Their peers are way more likely to see, know, and experience that because they're probably in the same age group, they may see them differently, and those walls between an athlete and a coach aren't there. So their ability to have the conversations, take the information that we're trying to give them, digest it, regurgitate it in a way that's going to be more receptive is way greater from their peers than it is from their coaches. And it doesn't matter how good of a coach you are. This is not an indication of your coaching capabilities. It's often an indication of your age and your status. So from an athlete's perspective, they're going to listen to their peers in a way that they're going to be listening differently to you as a coach. They may have greater respect for you, however, they will hear it differently from you. So having multiple different delivery systems, we know that no one hears the same thing as everybody else. Everybody's got their own unique fingerprint of the way that they process data and information.
So having multiple different delivery systems is just smart, right? If you're saying something and it's hitting 30%, and then the team dynamic have that conversation from the leadership group, and there's another 30%, then you already doubled your impact. And our optimal outcome is to get as close to 100% reception, 100% of unpacking and integration as possible. Now, we know, like we said at the start, we're never getting 100%. However, we want to aim towards that to reduce the gap. If you've got people on your side who are communicating in a way that you just can't, then you've just increased your effectiveness.
The next people that benefit from that, it's the big stage. In reality, coaching is not a player athlete and they're not out in the field like I said to you before. When you're on that big stage, having somebody out there who is communicating, who does have that rest of team's trust. And it's not necessarily just the person who's the team captain or the vice captain, because sometimes that isn't a great indicator of efficient communication. They may be the best player, or they may be the one that's most outspoken, but they're not always necessarily got across all the communication modeling.
So having a group of people out there does benefit on the big stage under pressure when things just aren't optimised. We looked at a lot of different ways here to be creating an environment that is optimised, it's ultimately what we're trying to do here. We're trying to create multiple layers of communication, efficiencies, and optimisation processes. One size doesn't fit all. And as a coach, our job is to integrate. Our job is to be able to read, understand, and deliver. Now, those of you who've listened to me talk about communication modeling, we've talked about the graveyard. They're the people who don't say a great deal, but when they do say it, it's loud and out of the blue and frightens the hell out of everybody. Then we have the machine gunner. Now, this is if we don't have a leadership group, our only form of communication to the masses is a machine gunner. And that's where most coaches fall into the mistake of, Okay, I can do this. I know absolutely everything that these people need to know, and you may. So in order for me to deliver all of that information, I've just got a machine gun, which means that you don't get to see if the information hit has been processed, has been applied, because by the time you've delivered that random shot, you're onto the next one, and trying to deliver that information to them and then onto the next one.
So your ability to assess your efficiency, your effectiveness of that messaging is heavily reduced. So we want to make sure that we are snipering. And our job as a coach isn't to give all the information all of the time. Our job as a coach is to give the information that gets distributed efficiently and effectively when necessary. And then our job is to correct and hone and get what we can out of every opportunity. Sometimes you might have to go in and adjust a little bit. So you become the expert rather than the jack of all trades trying to get all the information all the time. So having a team of people working with you from the inside, that leadership group who have the finger on the pulse that you could just never have, just makes smart sense. Often a coach will begrudgingly put a leadership group in where all the team have been orchestrated to be puppets for the coach. Now, from the outside looking in, you can look at that and go, Well, that just makes sense. Dave, that just supports everything you just said. You want the leadership group to communicate exactly what the coach said.
But you also want the leadership group because they're bringing data going the other direction. It's not only about what you as a coach want everybody in the team to know, but you as a coach need to know things that you just can't see, hear, or experience. It's a conduit going both ways. It's a symbiotic relationship. And that leadership group in the middle is taking information from the rest of the team and trying to communicate it back to you as a coach, too. So you've got better data, you've got you've got information that you just didn't have any other way. And then collectively, you analyse that, you come up with a strategy, and their job is then to distribute it back out. So as a coach, you can sometimes begrudgingly put that team together and think by orchestrating little mini mes of you out there, you're going to get the best result. That's not necessarily true. What you want is you want to have a leadership group that is constructed of people that are good communicators, are people that are good listeners. You got people in each of the demographic or maybe even positional groups. I work a lot in rugby. Sometimes you might have a representation from the backs, from the centres, from the forwards. I work with lots of different sports that have different formats, and it's important that everybody's part of the team feels represented. We can fall into the trap of just having a leadership group that is everybody. Why don't we just have this group where everybody sits down and we all openly discuss it? Well, if you've been in a team of anybody more than 10 people, then you know that's not a good strategy. You know you're going to have quiet people in there that are just not going to speak up because the coach is in the room. You know you're going to have people in there who are just going to go, I'm not going to do it anyway, because that's what everybody else wants. You know you're going to have people in there that are not necessarily going to tell you what you want to hear because they're fearful that you're not going to select them. So they're just going to say, Okay, boss, I'll do what you tell me. So you want to have a group of people that are one step removed from you, as a selecter, who can sit there and analyse that process.
So the makeup, the construction of a leadership group is critical. I always say you should never have more than five or six people in a leadership group, and they should be a good cross representation of the bigger group. They should have very specific skillsets that are necessary, and that will change depending on the individual sport or a team sport. They've got to have good ability to be able to communicate with you as a coach. There's no point in them going to have conversations. And again, I've seen this. I've been introduced into a leadership group where they would have a phenomenal conversation. And I would sit in and I would observe this and I'd go, Okay, this is great. These leaders really do understand the dynamic of this team. They really can communicate. There's people in this group who are communicating back to the leadership group that I haven't seen when say, boo to a goose in any training session. And then when the coaching staff and the leadership group come together, it's crickets. It's silent. All that great information isn't getting translated to the coaches, which creates a frustration from the coaches. And sometimes it's a blind faith that everything's wonderful until it all falls over.
So your leadership group needs to have very, very specific kinds of people who make it up. So we want to be aware that we do not want puppets. Yes, less drama from each coach, however, there's no credibility. We do not want dictators, people in there going, No, it's my way. I'm the leadership group. You're going to do as you're told. That doesn't work. There needs to be mutual respect and communication between the team and the leadership group. We do not want sheep, people who just blindly follow what everybody else says. We have an old saying in England, Run with the foxes and hunt with the hounds, which means when they're talking to the rest of the players or the team, they're all, Yeah, we need this. And then when they're talking to the coaches, they're, Yeah, we need this. And they're not actually resolving anything. They're just following whoever's speaking at the time. You do want good communicators. You do want people who are respected within the team. And as I say, it doesn't necessarily need to be the team captain. There's other people in the team that could be there because they've been there the longest.
It could be that they're the ones that speak up for the rest of the team. There's a whole variety of reasons. You do want representatives, as I said, from different parts of the groups. You want everybody to feel represented. You do want the big picture and the detailed representatives. You want people who are going to know this is our DNA, this is where we want to take this team. I can see it, it's clear inside my head. Then you want the people go, Yeah, absolutely. Let me build the steps to get there. I'm detail orientated. How do we construct our sessions? What's our language strategies? What's our performance strategies? And as I said, I always suggest around about five in the leadership group. Even if you've got a big team, you want a condensed leadership group. Sometimes six or seven, depending, but I would always try and err on the side of five. Any less than that, then you end up with it becoming a bit more of a dictatorship. And I would suggest meeting weekly and no more than an hour, and then also giving them a time to discuss that and then how they're going to implement that.
So we need to be able to create a world where there's a structure. We don't want this world where they sit there and have great ideas. Like I said, I've heard of great ideas and then there's no implementation past that. There's got to be a strategy. Okay, if we think this is important, we're going to change the way that we communicate, or we're going to change the way we warm up, or the way that we debrief, or whatever that is, then there needs to be an opportunity for them to integrate that, but also then to collect data. What's working, what's not working? What could we have done differently and grow and evolve that? We want to make sure that we empower. We don't defer, we don't try and create a world where it's just easy for us as a coach. What we need is a leadership group that complements the coaching staff and complements the playing group. And that is a critical component to how we create an environment that's beneficial for you as a coach, for the individual athlete, and the sustainability of your team. Now, if you've never considered building a leadership group in your sporting organisation, I hope today has given you a bit of a different perspective on why it could be the solution to some of your challenges.
I hope it gives you a different picture on how you grow people to be better communicators, how you grow them to have great collaboration skills, to understand cause and effect, to create ownership and responsibility, how to foster connection and build trust. When we look at all of those ingredients, when done right, you end up with a team that creates momentum. You have a team that deals with conflict, deals with challenges, it deals with success in such a way that they grow and thrive. If you want to learn more about how specifically you can build a group that is optimal and designed specifically for the development and growth of your club and your culture, then reach out or go and connect to SmartMind.Com and look up Coach. And that is our Main Arena Coach membership program. We go through this in great detail with you specifically around your sport, your group dynamic, the age of your athlete, your coaching structure. And we'll look at it from a very pragmatic and bespoke version of that.
So again, hope this podcast has given you a completely different perspective or confirmed that you have built a leadership group in your club. It was the right thing to do.
Hope you've enjoyed it. Hope you got a lot from it. And until the next episode of Brain in the Game, train smart and enjoy the ride. My name's Dave Diggle. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.
