Leadership in Coaching: Unexpected issues

Life does not move in a straight line. I was active as a coach for 30+ years and then POOF, long-haul COVID issues and a need to step away. That was unexpected.

Athletes deal with this regularly. The purest goal scorer in the NHL retired at age 30 (Mike Bossy) because of back problems (he’s the only player ever to score 50+ goals in five consecutive seasons…not even Gretzky). That’s not how he thought things would go.

You can think of numerous other athletes who have gone through health issues jeopardizing their careers whether it is on-field injury or guys like John Lester and Anthony Rizzo who come back after cancer.

So how do you deal with unexpected obstacles? It could be as simple as the opponent getting on a run because of your team’s mental mistakes. It could be your star player being ruled ineligible. It could be an upset, irrational parent. We can all name obstacles to success.

But isn’t that part of real leadership, how we deal with obstacles? Here’s how we deal with situations… *Do nothing, passively let the obstacle block all progress. *Complain a bunch before avoiding the impediment / figuring out a work-around *Complain a bunch and then deal with the obstacle (or better still complain and get someone else to deal with it) *Roll up the sleeves and deal with it directly.

So–we’ll take my situation in re coaching–a rather big obstacle since I’m not currently able to be in loud echoing white-lit gyms. How do you deal with it? For me–I’m writing various projects. Fiction, non-fiction, coaching stuff. This is an opportunity to rest/recharge in case the symptoms disappear and I can coach again…or it is the beginning of a completely different path. All good. I work on the Dietz Foundation.

I haven’t really complained about it–yay me. But reflecting on that, I realize that while actively coaching, I spent time complaining about obstacles. The problem I’m thinking about now though is–what do you do about obstacles (coaches running dishonest, unethical programs for instance) you do not control, obstacles which will return to your path and block your goal. I mean, how do you beat a team that isn’t playing fair? Should I change the goal? …or am I getting caught up in the scoreboard and looking for personal validation through that rather than the big picture… [yeah, I’m pretty sure I know the answer to that last bit, guilty as charged….]

Who would you want to follow? Maybe that’s a good way of looking at this, too. Maybe it isn’t just about who we are as leaders–but who we would want to follow as our ideal head coach/commander/boss. Do you want to follow the person who whines constantly–or the one who waits for someone else to take action? Is it good to follow someone who does exactly what you want them to do every time–is that leadership?

*** I sat on this one for some time rather than post it. I’ve come back to it twice to redo. This time it dawns on me that in many instances (not all) obstacles represent opportunities–if you can remain patient to think about them and how to overcome them. That’s really hard. It isn’t necessarily about instant-gratification either. Some obstacles can take weeks/months/years of constant effort to overcome–and there are times we just say “Hey, it’s not worth it to deal with this. I’m going in a different direction.”

Does that explain turnover rate in coaching? Do people leave coaching because they fight to break down obstacles and realize they aren’t making headway–so they find other paths in life where they feel they CAN make that difference? And if that’s true (so many questions…so few answers…), how do you organize people to get the obstacle removed?

It’s not just about having a lobbying organization (like the AVCA for volleyball). There are thousands of those out there. How do you get people to stay focused and work together, to continue with a common agenda? –The past 18 months showed dreadful abuses within law enforcement. What’s actually changed? People marched and…then went back to their XBoxes because marching takes a couple hours…and eliminating obstacles takes years.

Sigh–just a lot of questions today. Still important. Known knowns and known unknowns and all that. You can’t fix something if you don’t know it’s broken. You can’t check to see if it’s broken until you know how it is supposed to work.