Good Teams

Food for thought:

Good teams have the following building blocks:

1. Planning

2. Goals

3. Coordination

4. Diversity and Cohesion

Planning:

- Planning is inversely related to production time

- Leaders pay a bigger price for poor planning

Goals:

- Teams that set specific stretch goals outperform others

- Need to understand people's commitments and motives up front

and

- Leaders must lead with a vision/outcome in mind

- Effective goals have metrics

- You can design your roles with goals in mind

- Use backward induction (i.e. start planning with the last required step instead of the first step)

Coordination:

- Best teams have a connector who understands how the pieces should fit

- Best teams divide labor but individuals know the big picture and have a deep knowledge of relevant connection points

Diversity and Cohesion:
- Diversity of thought is good
- Cohesion is also good
- Diversity and Cohesion are typically at-odds, so
- Have a pre-defined mechanism for conflict resolution and inter-team discussion
such as
- Teach everyone to constructively criticize each other
- This process should include: a defined structure, norms, be focused on a task, be oriented towards shared goals and towards developing trust

Misc:

- Best teams are constantly learning and growing

- Best teams focus on process

Anything missing on your team?

Negotiating Coaching

This week we talked about Negotiating.  Negotiations as they were described essentially don't happen in coaching college ultimate.  But, a lot of smaller negotiations do happen!  So I'll try to pick and choose what's relevant.

Here are some examples of negotiations that occur when coaching ultimate:
1. Which tournaments to attend and why
2. What fitness plan to engage in and why
3. What offense system to use and why
4. What defensive system to use and why
5. What adjustments to make and how to present them to the team at halftime

All of these scenarios are considered "integrative negotiations", which is cooperative and the objective is to get into a win/win scenario.  This self-evident because you aren't negotiating with opponents, you are negotiating within your other coaches and captains.  So you shouldn't be getting into a lot of situations with competitive negotiating scenarios, I wouldn't think.

With the season planning items (1-4 above), I think the most important part is to properly prepare for your negotiations by doing background research and clearly explaining the purpose behind each decision.  The biggest hurdle to decisions like this are information, given how college teams systemically lose the upperclassmen who have done this research every year.  Once the information is present, being able to use the context of the competition (i.e. regional-based strategies/weather) feels like another obvious place to start, and you can even get into specific roster strengths you feel the team is more oriented towards.

I think 5 might be the most interesting.  It's sort of a negotiation and sort of not, but you have a lot of factors that make this situation hard.  For instance, you have about 2 minutes to talk to your co-coaches and/or captains to get a sense of what everyone is seeing, and from this information you need to select the most important thing and then cohesively find a way to communicate it to the team.  So you have a time constraint, you have a lot of things going on that are trying to pull your attention away, you have a lot of different perspectives, all of whom are seeing the game through different lenses and noticing different things.  And, if you end up with more than one action item, you can forget about your team being able to remember it and actually change anything on the field in the second half.  So, what do you do?

I think the most valuable thing here is to "create a script", or to create a focused way to share info and quickly arrive at the most important thing.  Another option could be to agree before the tourney that topics discussed in the huddle will be ideas mentioned in practice previously, or will be directly related to the explicit tourney goals, in order to keep the focus on-task.

Influence

"Influence" is a word that has been getting thrown around a lot in these leadership classes and training sessions.  Mostly it has been presented something like, "the role of a leader is to influence", and "how can you influence people to do what you want", and so on.

I was not a fan of this idea when I first heard it.  I felt like word "influence" had a negative connotation when used to describe one individual influencing another.  Basically an implication of someone taking "agency" (the ability to make ones' own decisions) away from someone else.  Essentially manipulating someone for personal gain.  I also felt (and still somewhat feel) that the word influence has a transactional flavor to it - i.e. a leader thinking "what can I gain from this person and how should I gain it".

Influence: The capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone or something, or the effect itself.

The definition of "influence" does not seem to carry the negative connotations that I felt at first. In fact, upon reading the definition it is immediately obvious how much influence coaches have and should have.  After all, what could be more important to coaching than what is listed in this definition?

In class, we talked a lot about different aspects of influence.  Some of it felt too political for my tastes, but there were plenty of things I think would relate well to coaching.  Here are a few:

As a coach, it is extremely important to be credible.  

Some aspects of credibility include: 

Trustworthiness and Authenticity - Are you genuine?  Can players count on you?

Competence - Do you know what you're talking about? 

Warmth - Do you care about the players as individuals?

One idea was that influence emanates from both who you are and how you deliver your message.  So one good example of this might be: if you are a coach but you behave immaturely, it will be impossible for players to take you seriously.

We talked about cognitive load, about the interaction between listening and actually absorbing information.  Basically, the idea was that in long lectures, about 90% of what is said is forgotten.  So obviously the lesson here is coaches need to be concise and specific.

We also talked about a lot of political tactics for the workplace.  While I found those to be sort of interesting in a general sense, and I like being aware of them so I can recognize others who utilize them, I do not feel they are relevant for the coaching environment.

Common Cognitive Errors

I sat through a pretty interesting class last week on collective decision-making and some common mistakes and misconceptions that are made in that process.  We talked about how collective decision-making influenced the launch of the Challenger and some of the steps leading up to the catastrophic gasket failure.  The lesson there was obvious, to say the least.

In this post I'm going to attempt to contextualize a few common decision-making errors and try to relate them to Northwestern Ultimate.

Seven biases that limit effective decision making:
1. Escalation of Commitment (i.e. Sunk Costs)
2. Loss Aversion
3. Confirmation Bias
4. Illusion of Transparency
5. Overconfidence Bias
6. Anchoring
7. Sampling on the Dependent Variable

1. Escalation of Commitment
Essentially, decisions should be forward looking and not oriented on the past.  So a good example of this for Northwestern Ultimate might be a coach or captain being hesitant to change our offensive strategy, perhaps considering that in the previous year we spent a lot of time and built a lot of team knowledge of a certain system.  And so perhaps the leadership doubles down on what was not an ideal offense, using a lot of practice time resources on it and ending up in largely the same non-ideal position.

2. Loss Aversion
This is a status-quo preference.  So for Northwestern Ultimate, perhaps a captain or coach is concerned about making a big change because this could result in a rankings drop or a lower end-of-season finish in the series.  Basically the idea is centered around worry related to "What do we stand to lose".  Two re-framing solutions were offered to this, both of which I totally loved: A. Re-frame it as "What do you stand to gain?", or B. Re-frame it as "What do we stand to lose if we don't seek change?"

3. Confirmation Bias
The idea here is that we seek out information that confirms what we know.  So for example, at a strategic level, if I think "side stack is the best offense", I will seek out examples that show great side stack offense to justify my position.  At a player level, when I see a good player make a good play, I might think that confirms my belief that they are good.  But if I see someone who I think is a good player make a bad play, I am naturally quicker to dismiss it as a rare mistake.  This is certainly on display in the tryout phase for Northwestern Ultimate, and is very difficult to address.

4. Illusion of Transparency
This one is a "tendency to overestimate the degree to which our mental state is known by others".  I think this is basically a fundamental underlying tenet of team chemistry and has very broad applicability.  It seems to me like this comes into play in basically every interpersonal interaction within the team, and the better your team is equipped to navigate it, the better your team chemistry will be.  Things like team retreats seem to be good ways of helping to build a base from which to navigate this.  Also formalizing feedback mechanisms and check-ins with players feels vital for this.

5. Overconfidence Bias
This means that people tend to be more certain about things with a little information, i.e. "A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing".  An obvious one here is when players put too much value on power rankings or what they've heard about a team, without having seen them play.  In the past years, going into a game, players have expressed remarkable confidence that they are outmatched or are going to lose, before the game has even begun.  Obviously thinking this is not how to set your squad up for success.

6. Anchoring/Insufficient Adjustment
Essentially this is saying that we overvalue our initial reference points of things, even if those initial references are irrelevant later on.  And also, we don't adjust as dramatically as we need to.  A good example of this is on an individual player level on defense.  For example, maybe we're playing a matchup scheme and player X gets toasted deep.  One option is I can try to coach them to adjust and build in a bigger buffer, but if I'm not explicit in the magnitude of that buffer (or if we haven't really practiced this kind of adjustment), the change that is made is often not as big as it should be.

7. Sampling on the Dependent Variable
This is sample selection bias.  The example that was provided in class was "books on management that just look at the strategies of successful companies".  The idea here is that without a full set of data, (i.e. strategies of both successful and unsuccessful companies) we aren't able to gain very much insight into what really works and what doesn't.  So for Northwestern Ultimate, this means that only looking at what frequent nationals-qualifying teams do can only go so far, it really be best to understand the key differences between those teams and teams that do not make the big show, in order to draw more functional links between behaviors.

----

One thing I forgot to mention last week was on my mind this week, so I want to put it here as food for thought:

Top Down Change Often Leads to Poor Implementation

Simply mandating that people do something and enforcing it with:
- Mandatory training
- Complaint Systems
- Tests
Does not result in successful implementation.

What works better:
- Voluntary (Opt-in) Training
- Self-managed teams (i.e. Ownership)
- Cross-Training (i.e. Breadth)
- Mentoring and Peer Mentoring
- Task Forces (i.e. Empowerment)

Leadership Frameworks

One of the things I still struggle with is a proper definition for "Leadership".  To me, leadership means a lot of things and is an extremely large umbrella term that captures all of them.  Within a coaching context, there are tons of books that compete to describe the ideal characteristics of a good leader.  Anyway, I'm taking a class on Leadership, so I want to assess a few of the ideas as they come up and possibly relate them to ultimate.

The following definition for leadership is proposed:

"Leadership consist of the tools and resources you use to mobilize people to collaborate together to create something of social value."

To support this definition, there is some specificity around what is meant by "collaboration":

Collaboration: collective action among interdependent parties working towards shared goals.

There was also a good amount of discussion that since leadership consists of tools and resources, it is something that is trainable and improvable.

Overall, I think this is a pretty good definition.  It's vague enough to capture a lot of things but also has enough structure to be actionable.  I think collaboration as used here is still a bit vague, but it's basically proposed as the key to getting teams to achieve things "greater than the sum of their parts", and so I think it makes sense.  One small gripe I have with this definiation is it feels a bit transactional in nature, as it seems like you provide input x and then this team of other people can now collaborate, which seems to assume a basic hierarchy.  I don't know if this is a real issue or not, but this a blog, not a research paper.  Final note, I definitely am all about the growth mindset stuff in here.  Big fan of that part.

One other note I felt was pretty good was a discussion of what good leadership outcomes look like.  Basically it was presented like this:

Good leadership results in:

Decisions: Facilitates effective group decision-making

Influence: Influence others to adopt those decisions

Implementation & Motivation: Design structures to implement those decisions and motivate people to do it effectively

I think the best part of this for me was the last part, I found it interesting to think about leadership actions in terms of structures that maintain buy-in.  I think that has tons of obvious carry-over to coaching or captaining a team.