In his book Inside/Out Coaching, Joe Erhmann poses the question, “Why do you coach?” The answer for many of us is that we love the sport we are coaching and we want to share that experience with others. Each coach and program are going to have their own “non-negotiables” regarding what schemes, techniques, tactics, terminology that an assistant coach has at their disposal, but if coaches never have an opportunity to exercise their own autonomy over their area of responsibility, it is difficult for many to buy in. In short, if you as the head coach to place some trust in them, why would they in turn trust you?
In his book on motivation, Drive, Dan Pink discusses the research of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, who are the creators of Self Determination Theory, which shows that when people have autonomy, they feel in control of the decisions they are making in their lives. When people have control of their lives, they tend to have much higher levels of motivation.
In the book Drive, Pink writes:
“The fundamentally autonomous quality of human nature is central to self-determination theory (SDT). As I explained in the previous chapter, Deci and Ryan cite autonomy as one of the three basic human needs. And of the three, it’s the most important—the sun around which SDT’s planets orbit. In the 1980s, as they progressed in their work, Deci and Ryan moved away from categorizing behavior strictly as either extrinsically motivated or intrinsically motivated to categorizing it as either controlled or autonomous. ‘Autonomous motivation involves behaving with a full sense of volition and choice,’ they write, ‘whereas controlled motivation involves behaving with the experience of pressure and demand toward specific outcomes that comes from forces perceived to be external to the self.’”
Pink offers four ways for leaders to encourage autonomy in their team: time, task, technique and team. Time relates to how much time a coach has at their disposal as well as how to organize the time that is given to them. Task is that the coach is allowed to decide what they will do. Technique allows a coach to decide how they are going to do it. Finally, with team, you allow your coach to determine playing time, personnel, positions, and maybe even disciplinary actions.
You may not give your assistants a tremendous amount of freedom in all four areas but, if you want your coaches to have a sense of autonomy, you have to allow them an opportunity to lead as well.
Kite’s second function of leadership is to get results through others. When analyzing this with your program, there are four major areas to consider: coaches, kids, parents, community/school. The key lesson here is that effective head coaches and athletic directors don’t try to take care of everything themselves. They recognize what needs to be done and then set out to build systems to take care of those tasks.
Whether it be tasking a coach with supervising the weight room, giving locker room policing duties to captains, pre game meals to parents or having the booster club run a fundraiser, coaches need to delegate duties to others in order to grow their impact beyond what they can do in a given 24 hour period.
If you like this post, you can find more information on the topic of coaching your coaches in my book, The Athletic Leader’s Guide to Coaching Coaches which is now available in Kindle on Amazon.com