Finding Innovative Ways to Provide Value as a Coach
As a coach at any level, it is always important to be a source of growing value to any team you are a part of. Here are a few innovative ways coaches can add value to their teams and coaching staffs.
Being on Top of Trends
Staying up-to-date with the trends that top organizations and teams in your sport are adopting are great ways to know what separates the best teams in your sport, as well as thinking and planning for ways that these trends can be implemented with your team, on your staff, or in your own coaching.
Research what the most successful teams in your sport are doing in player development, coaching, strategy, and more. Then, take what you learn and prepare how you would potentially implement these trends within your organization. It is not enough to simply report what you are seeing other successful teams doing. Go the extra mile and give your head coach or team leaders something tangible they can potentially implement and prove that you are not only a great source of knowledge, but know how to make that knowledge useful.
Incorporating Analytics
Finding creative ways that other teams, and even other sports, are currently leveraging the power of analytics in sports to have a better understanding of in-game decisions, player evaluation, and talent development.
Steve Kerr and Pete Carroll spoke about the ways they have incorporated analytics into their respective programs in 2020 when they had Los Angeles Dodgers Manager Dave Roberts on their podcast to discuss getting players to buy into analytics. And as much information and stats that are available today for coaches and teams, Pete Carroll noted how “having a strategy to utilize the information that you get” when making decisions in-game is among the crucial pieces that their team has benefited from.
Coaches can benefit from asking themselves not only what statistics and information they believe in, but also what will be the most efficient way to receive and utilize that data in-game and in the office. Considering what other coaches have talked about can be a great place to start, and then one can additionally dig deeper and start thinking about their own beliefs and what information can be quantified even further. What ways could this potentially be useful?
Thinking outside the box and looking at traditional stats within your sport from a different lens, and challenging the way that you and other coaches view these stats and what they mean, and also looking for alternate stats to quantify similar aspects or production within the game and finding ways to use them within your normal procedures of preparation and evaluation.
Use Stories to Connect with Players
Great storytelling is a skill that can not be commoditized, and a leader’s ability to relate to their people is a great way to provide value to the team and your players. Learning how to master your storytelling ability is an underrated yet crucial skill that can help good leaders become great. Coaching and leadership is about positively influencing those surrounding you, and there is no better way to create that influence than by developing the ability to set a compelling vision for the team and highlighting how each player fits into the team vision.
The Harvard Business Review wrote how storytelling is the key to landing a new job, and gave some pretty good tips for how people can improve their storytelling ability. As the article state, we are all storytellers and use this skill everyday. By improving our storytelling and picking the “right narrative, you can make anyone you want feel great”, elevating a leader’s ability to motivate and inspire their teams. This is a huge part of leading people and putting them in positions to be successful.
Knowing how to reach your audience and utilizing the power of emotion to connect with your people will help leaders paint a picture of the vision, and connect teams to how they fit into that picture for the team.
