This article provided by Coaches Toolbox, a collection of free resource for coaches of all sports

Editor’s Note from Brian. As coaches, we have many tough decisions. In some ways, we are similar to being the CEO of our programs. Here are some business lessons that can be applied to coaching as well.

by Kevin Dee

At any other level within an organization there is someone else to challenge/stop/change or just agree with the tough calls. The buck stops with the CEO which means she/he is ultimately responsible for all company decisions.

Experienced CEOs will generally get the calls right and know that, because they are not infallible, there will sometimes be mistakes. He/she knows that ultimately making a decision is always better than a “no decision” and most mistakes can be fixed if necessary.

Some leaders run into trouble, by making poor decisions, or by avoiding making decisions. In my experience there are a number of reasons for this:

• They are unwilling to get/listen to the right input before making a decision.
• They think they have all the answers themselves.
• They become paralyzed by the amount of input to the situation requiring a decision.
• They lack confidence in their ability to make the right call.
• They are worried about upsetting some people with their decision.

If the leader having a problem is not the CEO, then the problem can be solved quickly by a decision made by a more senior executive.

If the leader having a problem is the CEO, the impact on the organization is significant. CEOs MUST be willing to make tough calls, and be seen to act on decisions. The majority of those decisions should be sound decisions. This builds confidence and trust, which in turn creates a healthy leadership team.

This Championship Values exercise is an interactive tool for you to use in determining your values and those of your teammates.

By Cory Dobbs, Ed.D.

Values are among the most stable and enduring characteristics of people. They are the foundation on which attitudes and personal preferences are formed. Our core values are crucial in making vital decisions, determining life directions, and behaving in social interactions. Values help define our morality and our conceptions of what is “good” and what is “right.” Many of our behaviors are a product of the basic values we have developed throughout our lives.

However, a problem with values is that they are generally taken for granted. Most of the time people are unaware of their values and how they shape attitudes and behaviors. Unless a person’s value’s are challenged they will remain largely undetected. People are not aware that they hold some values as being more important than others. This unawareness leads to actions or behaviors that are sometimes contrary to values, or even leads to confusion about values.

The Championship Values exercise is an interactive tool for you to use in determining your values and those of your teammates. As you work through the eight steps to your team’s Championship Values, keep in mind that sometimes the best way to stimulate discussion of values is to pose a difficult situation that demands a hard look at how a value will help you best resolve the situation. For additional resources for value-driven leadership consider The Academy for Sport Leadership’s Case Studies.

Step 1 Each team member is to think through the values (Relationship Oriented and Results Oriented) and identify circle the sixteen (8 Relationship / 8 Results) most important values—for you as a member of this team. Be sure to carefully think through just what the value is and why it’s important to you.

Step 2 Fill in the brackets with your eight (8) Relationship Oriented values on the left side and eight (8) Results Oriented values on the right side. Do this exercise individually.

Step 3 Pitting value vs. value tournament style. After placing all sixteen values in the brackets,
determine a winner and move the winning values along toward the middle of the chart.

Step 4 Once you’ve completed your Championship Values tournament you’ll have identified your top four values (2 Relationship / 2 Results). Be sure that you’ve thought through the value of each
value!

Step 5 Now split your team into triads (groups of three) and discuss the values. As a triad come to an agreement on 16 values and fill out the brackets. This should take some time as you and your teammates will need to work through personal differences to reach shared values.

Step 6 Once you’ve got the 16 shared values begin your tournament. At each stage engage in
meaningful conversation to identify a winning value.

Step 7 Once you’ve completed your Championship Values tournament as a triad, begin the same process as a team. When you finish your tournament you will have identified four (the final four
values) values that will be strongly internalized, advocated, and acted upon by all team members. The discussion should reveal values a clear-cut set of values for you and your teammates—standards of behavior towards one another and individual and team performance.

Step 8 Do the Championship Values exercise as a complete team. Your goal is a relationship between team members based on shared, strongly internalized values that are advocated and acted
upon by all team members.

Click here to download a blank template of the Tool

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)

This article is also posted on the Coaches Toolbox, a collection of free resources for coaches of all sports

By Cory Dobbs, Ed.D.

A Note to the Student-Athlete

The Little Big Things
Excellence Begins by Sweating the Small Stuff

I recently had breakfast at a neighborhood Denny’s.  During the course of the meal I visited the restroom.  Upon entering I noticed scraps of paper towel on the floor.  The sink basin revealed soap drippings that had probably been there since the day before.  No, I’m not a neat freak.  It’s just that in a world addicted to mediocrity little things are really big things.

The small stuff matters.

To me, a clean and attractive restaurant is the best indicator that the people running the show—at the restaurant, school, hotel, you fill in the blank, care about the people that use the facilities (and this includes the workers!).  Make no mistake, the restroom screams commitment to excellence.  It takes great leadership to ensure clean restrooms.  If you want to be different—successful—a great place to start is your locker room (And here’s the kicker…each and every one of you will be running a show somewhere and sometime in the future.).

How do you and your teammates care for your locker room?  Do you use it and wait for others (coaches, janitors, etc) to pick up the mess?   To me, a clean and attractive locker room tells me the people running the program care (Come to think of it, the way you take care of your playing field, court etc. tells a lot about your commitment to excellence).  If you’re a team leader then you’re running the program.  We are all leaders.

The small stuff matters.  What little things might you do today to make a big difference in your team?

Humility matters.  Your actions reflect not only on you personally, but also on your team.  Act in a manner that honors yourself and your teammates. Act in a manner that will reflect well on you and the others in your life.

Today’s headlines and daily news stories are filled with accounts of self-centered and irresponsible professional athletes.  The world of sports often breeds excess—it is noble and ignoble, beautiful and ugly.  Sports reveals the best and the worst of human nature in a highly visible action-packed arena dominated by intense emotion.

Humility is the quality of being respectful.  It is displayed in conduct that dignifies others.  Humility is found in the small stuff.  How you talk to your teammates reveals your care and concern.  How you listen to others reveals your commitment to them and your team.  Leadership matters.  And the best team leaders model humility, they serve and honor their teammates.  We are all leaders.

Sometimes one minute makes all the difference.

How long does it take for you to care for your locker room?  Your playing field?  Your teammate?  My guess is you can do a lot in one minute…and when all those small one-minute actions accumulate…

The small stuff matters.  What little things might you do today to make a big difference in your team?  Select at least one thing.  And do it.

You can make excuses for not doing that one thing.  If so, then excuses are probably small stuff to you.  And remember, the small stuff matters.  In the final analysis, it is the small stuff that determines what we draw out of sports and what we draw out of life.  The little things make all the difference.

The Academy for Sport Leadership

Championship teams have great leadership.  Not only must the coach be a great leader, but he/she must be able to teach their athletes to be more effective leaders. Teaching leadership is just as important, or more so, than anything else you teach in your program.

In the two clips below Greg Dale, Director of Mental Training and Leadership Programs for Duke University Athletics, discuss how to begin the process of developing your team leaders.

The clips are from a DVD entilted The Coach’s Guide to Developing Great Team Captains. For more ideas on developing leaders click on the link above.

The YouTube video below has audiod, so please make sure that you have sound turned on and that you have access to the site(some schools may block access to YouTube)
 
 

Great Leadership leads to great teams, but leadership can be a difficult and scary proposition for student athletes. Here are two lessons learned that can help athletes take the risks necessary to lead.

Cory Dobbs, Ed.D.

Lessons from the Art Studio

“Students who are truly student-athletes have a chance for a life-transforming, life-shaping experience. I can tell you how thankful I am for having had that experience and how it’s shaped me in countless ways. It’s an absolutely formative experience.” –
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan,
Speaker at the 2010 NCAA National Convention in Atlanta, Ga.

Leadership is one of the most important topics of our time. And it’s likely one of the most important attributes for effectiveness in any human endeavor. The success of any institution, organization, group, or team, is grounded in the effective application of leadership. For any organization to sustain success it must invest in the development of leaders—current and future— to avoid a regression towards mediocrity.

Since the dawn of civilization, groups have utilized leadership for various purposes beginning with the need for survival. Organizations today view leadership as a necessity for success and it is hard to find a person today who does not give at least lip service to the importance of developing leaders.

Yet despite this apparent intent to nurture the development of leaders, we still find ourselves desperately searching for leaders that can create and sustain success. Perhaps part of the problem is the way we teach leadership.

I teach leadership courses in two different graduate colleges for the same university. Different students, same classroom. The classroom consists of a podium, tables with chairs and a white board. The rooms are designed for teachers to stand and students to sit.

However, the classroom in which my colleague teaches art is quite different. In her art studio she often does not stand and students don’t sit. The simple reversal of classroom roles leads to a different mode of learning. Students in the art classroom poke around, observing the work of their fellow students. They ask questions, share stories, exchange insights, and offer praise or constructive critiques.

I’ve learned some powerful lessons from studying learning in the art studio. Two, of them in particular have reshaped the way I approach leadership development.

1. Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.
2. The fear of failure will guarantee failure.

Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing Badly
Not the orthodox way of looking at excellence. However, leadership is a messy proposition for anyone learning to lead. Since leadership is a social process, it follows that team leaders will need to experiment with such things as peer accountability. Invariably, the beginning leader will stumble. Encourage your student-athletes to get going, start leading, and take the lumps that come with learning to lead.

The art studio encourages the student to explore. Taking risks—experimentation—and being willing to do leadership badly are part of the learning process. In the art studio students are encouraged when they do something badly. They quickly look at the bad product and figure out how to improve upon their work. Poor outcomes are not seen as failures. Rather, the art student returns to the canvas to try again.

To offer some real-world perspective on bad leadership as a learning opportunity, take a quick look backwards to when you took your first coaching job. Who among us can’t look back and see incompetence and failure in some leadership efforts during our formative years? I’m on pretty safe ground here knowing that all competent coaches attended Hard Knocks University.

Here’s a simple way for you to guide your student-athletes to face the fact that risk is necessary for them to fully develop as a leader. Have them set up a matrix that involves listing leadership goals on one side of the ledger with possible risks on the other.

Sample Leadership Goal

To promote team unity through a weekly players only meeting.

Risk

One or more team members do not want  to attend and see the leaders as “better than them”

Fear of Failure Will Guarantee Failure
While the artist’s palette contains a wide-array of vibrant colors, the only color emerging leaders see is gray. Nothing appears to be black and white for the beginning leader. She’s not sure where to start, what to do, how to take leadership action. Fear of failure is real.

Failure often affects confidence and self-esteem. However, failure is not fatal. Giving your leaders the license to fail is a starting point. Creating a learner-centered approach to leader development can help the novice and the experienced team leader. Artists that persevere face their fear of failure. Failure in the art studio is guaranteed. Perfection is desired, but failure is acknowledged as part of the process.

I’ve noticed far too many young leaders fearful of leaving their comfort zones, clinging to what is comfortable and secure. The art student is encouraged to venture out and explore new styles and tools. In the art studio it is folly to discount mistakes and failure.

In the art studio, students are confronted with reality. What they put on canvas is available for all to see. Sometimes the visible picture doesn’t match the artist’s heart and effort. Such moments can be both disheartening and empowering. Vulnerability is a vital part of learning to become an artist—and a team leader.

Leadership certainly can begin to be taught in a classroom. Yet conventional methods of leadership training often fail to prepare students for the messiness of leadership. The art studio provides another model to explore as a bold approach for developing your team leaders. Experimentation, exploration, and action will involve mistakes and failure. Guiding your young leaders through the risks of leadership may well be the most important role you assume as a leadership educator.

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

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

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.