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Goal Sets and Accountability Cards: Systems for Individual Athlete Goals

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When Frosty Westering was the head football coach at Pacific Lutheran, he had only four coaches total on staff for a program that was a perennial national title contender. A friend of mine played on the 1999 National Championship team for PLU and told me that they did not really every have an “individual” time at practice for skills/drills for fundamentals, etc. What they did instead was what Frosty referred “goal sets.”

Each week, players would meet individually with their position coach to go over their goal sets. They would create a goal for four areas: Skills and Technique, Strength and Conditioning, Team Building and Attitude. For each area they would identify a goal and then create an action plan that was specific and measurable. Players would then track their progress over the week and either revise their goal at their next meeting or set a new one.

An example my friend used for the Skills and Technique was that he wanted to get better at catching fade, so his action plan was to catch 25 fades before practice and 25 after. At the end of the week, he could point to 250 reps that helped him get better at catching fades. Using what I learned from my friend, I developed this form for goal sets for my wrestlers at Redmond.  You may also find this sheet from our team book on GAP=Goals, Attitude and Perseverance.

A very similar practice but somewhat lower maintenance has to do with creating and tracking “Accountability Cards.” Performance coach Brett Ledbetter uses a character checklist with a bunch of performance and moral skills. He asks them to select one performance skill and one moral skill they are going to focus on that week.

Here’s an example:
Performance Skill: Hardworking
Moral Skill: Appreciative

Once they’ve identified those, the athlete writes on a note card how she’s going to work on that. For hardworking, Ledbetter gives the example of “making 150 shots before practice 3x this week.” For the moral goal of being appreciative, an example would be “writing three thank-you notes to teammates.” At the end of the week, he asks his athletes if they get their card back. If they followed through and met their goals, the card is returned and a new card filled out. If not, they go another week working toward those goals. Over the course of the season, they track how many of their cards each athlete gets back. Ledbetter refers to these as “Accountability Cards.”

One of the goals of our athletic program is for each individual to have a “championship experience” regardless of their ability, role or skill level.  While it will take some effort for every kid in your plan to both create weekly goal sets or accountability cards, I think the pay off is that you will intentionally build relationships, invest in the character development of your athletes, provide your athletes autonomy in their skill development and model for them a process of setting goals and achieving them.

Here is Ledbetter’s Character Checklist from his book What Drives Winning if you’re interested:

Character Checklist
Performance Moral
Hardworking Unselfish
Competitive Honest
Positive Respectful
Focused Appreciative
Accountable Humble
Courageous Patient
Resilient Loyal
Confident Trustworthy
Enthusiastic Trustwilling
Disciplined Encouraging
Motivated Socially Aware
Creative Caring
Curious Empathetic

 

Listening Better=Better Coaching

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I’m currently working my way through the excellent Daniel Croyle book The Culture Code.  In the book, I’ve been struck by the parallels between what Croyle points out as how to create cooperation in small groups and individuals and the coaching habit Michael Bungay Stanier promotes in his book The Coaching Habit.

In The Culture Code, Croyle details how Roshi Vivechi of IDEO, an international design firm located in Palo Alto, California works with teams to help them navigate the design process.  She uses what she calls “Flights,” or all-team meeting that occur the start, middle and end of every project, similar to an after action review in the military.  Givechi’s “research” largely consists of conversations to learn the issues that the team have been struggling but both logistically and inter personally.

Once she has concluded researching the project, she gathers the group and asks question design to expose friction and aid the group in reorienting or clarifying their objective and the best way forward.  She uses the term “surfacing” for this process.

“I like the word connect,” Givechi says.  “For me every conversation is the same, because it’s about helping people walk away with a greater sense of awareness, excitement, and motivation to make an impact.  Because individuals are really different.  So you have to find different ways to make it comfortable and engaging for people to share what they’re really thinking about.  It’s not about decisiveness–it’s about discovery.  For me, that had to do with asking the right questions the right way.”

This is reminiscent of Michael Bungay Stanier’s book The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More and Change the Way You Lead Forever.  Basically the book teaches that our advice is not as good as we think it is and that by asking questions before rushing to offer a solution we reduce overdependence and resistance while helping to improve the quality of decision making from those that we oversee.

As Stanier says in the book, “Even though we don’t really know what the issue is, or what’s going on for the person, we’re quire sure we’ve got the answer she needs.”

Bob Metcalf the founder of 3Com and inventor of ethernet tells a story about the first operations meeting after being replaced by Bill Krause at the CEO of the company Metcalf had founded.  During the meeting, Bill spent the entire meeting writing on a pad of paper. Out of curiosity Metcalf walked behind Bill and noticed what he had written a hundred times was, “DNT.”  

After the meeting had concluded, Metcalf went to Bill and asked what “DNT” meant.  Bill’s reply was, “Bob, I talk too much and the way I keep myself from talking is writing, ‘Do Not Talk.’”  Taking notes while others were talking did make them feel like what they were saying was important, however, by reminding himself to not talk, he was enabling himself to be a better listener.

A 1984 study by Howard Beckman and Richard Frankel found that the average time to interruption for doctors was eighteen seconds suggesting that Bill Krause’s system for listening would be a good practice for others to adopt, including coaches.  People in general don’t really listen so much as they listen for an opportunity to share what they are thinking as well.

Whatever your role, becoming a better listener is probably an area that most of us could benefit from developing.  I know that for me as an athletic director and as a parent/husband, need to spend more time developing this skill.

 

What Outcome Equals “Success” in Youth and High School Sports?

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For those of us who are old enough to remember Arnold Schwarzenegger as a body builder who only played parts where his thick Austrian accent didn’t interfere too much with the main plot lines, you may remember his line in Conan the Barbarian when asked, “What is best in life?”  His answer, if you haven’t committed it to memory was:

“To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.”

Okay, so maybe not the most modern definitions of success.  As someone who is interested in developing and sustaining a principle based culture where I work, I feel it is important to have a good working definition of what success is so that all stakeholders are on the same page. 

Our school and district have partnered with the Positive Coaching Alliance to implement their core principle and values to improve the experience of all of our student-athletes.  For our coaches, we expect that they exhibit the characteristics of the double goal coach.  In short, we want our coaches to focus on doing everything they can to put the best product in the competitive arena but not at the cost of doing everything we can to develop our student athletes as people.  Better athletes, better people.

While I think most of us know what our teams/student-athletes need to do to better themselves as competitors, some may question what exactly we can do to define exactly what a “better person” is.  In Episode 325 of the Tim Ferriss Podcast I think I may have found a definition that I like to describe what we hope our athletes get from their interscholastic athletic experience.

“When asked the question, What habits or skills are most important to living a successful life,” former CD Baby CEO Derek Sivers responded as follows:

“First let’s define success.  Robin Williams and Philip Seymour Hoffman were successful actors I think it’s a tough call. Like my first reaction is “yes,” but the more I think about it, my answer moves halfway toward “no.”

As a different example, think of someone you know who you’d consider to be like the definition of a total loser. Now give that person a million dollars, are they now a winner?  Of course not. Now that sounds like a totally contrived example but a lot of fame and fortune is dropped in the lap of people who were just the right face in the right place at the right time, but are actually awful, miserable people by any definition.

So the more you think it through the more you realize that you have to define success first by your inner game, not some outside measure of money or fame, right?  Mastering yourself, your mind and your actions. But now, but if you only master yourself and you don’t help anyone else, well then we’d call you happy, but like nobody would define you as successful.

So the very definition of success must include how much you helped others.  And I’ll bet if you helped thousands of people, even if you didn’t ultimately profit from it, but you were personally miserable well, we still might call you successful because you helped others, right?

So the point is, if you want to be undeniably successful, you need to both master yourself and help others.  Don’t focus on the money or the fame, the real success is mastering your emotions and actions and actually helping lots of people.”

Based on the definition, Derek went on to answer the original question, what habits or skills are most important to living a successful life, with these four points:

  1. Managing your state and your emotional actions and reactions.
  2. Knowing what people need in general and what you need in particular.
  3. People skills–how to see things from other people’s point of view and how to communicate from their point of view.
  4. Ability to focus, learn, practice and apply what you learned.

I hope that this resonated with you as much as it did with me.  As we contemplate the end result of experience that we want kids to take from their time in sports, I think helping them along this path to success, is as good a vision as I have heard.

Also, if you’re interested, I have some digital that you may be interested in.  Take a look here: http://www.smartcoachingblog.com/products/

 

Coffee Prevents Cholera: Why You Need to Build Systems to Have a Championship Program

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This year marks the 175th anniversary of the Oregon Trail.  The  2,170-mile Oregon Trail and it’s offshoots were traveled by 350,000 people from 1846-1869.  Historians estimate that of those 350,000 who started the trip, as many as 30,000 died along the way, or an average of 10-15 deaths per mile.  This has led some to call the Oregon Trail “America’s longest graveyard.”

The main cause of death on the trail was disease with Cholera being the disease resulting in more illness and death than all of the other maladies experienced by the emigrants.  In order to combat the spread of cholera, dysentery and other diseases, the popular preventive measure recommended by Catharine Beecher (half sister of author and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe) was to give every man, woman and child coffee.

The daily routine for pioneers was that before the wagon train got started on their journey for the day, the women of the camp would make coffee and everyone would drink it.  Around the middle of the day, the wagons would need to have their wheels soaked in water (or recycled urine if in the desert) in order to expand the wood so that they would remain tight up against the iron rings).  While the men did maintenance on the wagons, the women would make coffee.  Finally in the evening, coffee again was the beverage of choice of everyone on the trail contrary to the advice of modern of sleep experts.

I’m sure by now you’re either wondering what about coffee prevents the spread of cholera and why Starbucks hasn’t included this in an ad campaign.  The answer is that nothing about coffee specifically prevents cholera or any other communicable disease.  The “secret sauce” was that by making coffee, pioneers were forced to boil their water ridding it of any microorganisms that may lead to disease.

What the pioneers had found was a system.  It didn’t really matter that the beverage selected was coffee, what mattered is that the process required to make coffee resulted in the desired end result.  One key to having successful programs is to start at the center with “what makes the boat go faster” and build systems around this concept.  As you have systems, policies and procedures in place that are eliciting the desired results, you can continue to build out in concentric circles.

I liken systems to Zig Ziglar’s analogy of priming the pump.  If you’ve ever used an old hand water pump you know that it takes a considerable amount of effort to draw the water up from the well but once you have it flowing, just a little effort will keep the water coming for as long as you want it do.

Running a profitable summer camp was a similar experience for me.  When I first took over our program, how to get the word out, collect money, get someone to supervise the player-coaches, organizing the activities, etc., required some work.  Once I had those things worked out from online registration to having a coach who could be the “director” to an expectation that seniors were our player-coaches and finally, having every station, game and activity on a laminated card that allowed us to “plug and play” activities/stations, it was really almost no work at all but still generated the same amount of revenue if not more than when we made the initial push to get started.

An example of this may be creating a “Champions Notebook” for your program.  Having a system to maximize the result with committing a reasonable amount of resources is key here.  If you assign each coach in your program one week of the notebook, it probably will only take a short time to create a comprehensive resource for your program.

Building systems in your program will help save you time and increase your impact on coaches and kids.  Analyze what the most important things are in your program and how you can automate, delegate and replicate these outcomes.