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.