Getting your team behind you

I think I have to start with some background about the banner. The American Football team you see above are the Red Knights Tübingen, a team, club I'm a member of, since 1997. Three year ago I took over the Head Coach position for the seniors team, and one of my first actions as coach was to send the whole team into lock down because of the pandemic. We are an American Football team in Germany, similar to the many other teams in Germany, all players and coaches are volunteers.

American Football is a great team sport, maybe one of the greatest (I can see the comments hit this post already :-) ), on the other side if you look at the organisation style in a football team it is more a hierarchical style with usually a rough tone. Not what you find in modern leadership talks or a modern leadership mentality.

Ok, you might ask yourself now, what does he want to talk about. Let me get to it. We had a really bad season last year. We closed with 2-10 as the last one in our league with the consequence to move down one league. Not that the team was really bad, but there was always a little bit missing in all of the dimensions.

Within the last weeks months I used the time to look into what had happened, what did not happen and learned elements about my actions and how to not do the same thing again. In Germany season starts in Spring, so we are now close to season opener and I wanted to share what I changed and how it worked out.

Let me start first with the season 2022 and some numbers. If I'm honest it is my first year as Head Coach playing a season. The program I have contains about 70 players 5 coaches and a little bit of support around it, as mentioned all of them are volunteers, no payment. Practice on field was 2 times a week (evening), 1 time video analysis (evening) and 12 games on weekend between April and August.

A lot of their private time....

Looking back, what went wrong in this season. During the retrospective Sessions with my coaches and my captains team there was a usual mix of elements based on the what. Which is obvious as this was the point one I and so the rest had the most focus on. We worked hard and often, but the results we needed and expected did not come. So we did more, of the same. Guess what? We still struggled. If there would be a BS Bingo of things which are not working well in an organisation, I probably would have filled a lot of fields. From missing communication, prioritisation, wrong or not done decisions up to trying to work in silos. And I tried hard to push them toward the finish line which is a really energy intense work and it does not give you enough time and space to step back and look at what is all not going well.

Another point, which might be important well, was I did not get the team behind the mission, or the goal. I would even go further, did we had a goal or did only I had a goal. I came to the conclusion, there was no real defined goal. Yes off course everybody wants to win, but not everybody was aware what it is necessary. It got obvious to me as I was listening to another Head Coach and how she worked with her team. I did not ask Why? Why am I doing it? Why are all the others spending their free time in gym, on the field, in video classes and so on? Like Simon Sinek explains it here I was spending too much time on the How and What and not on the Why.

Now how to change it. Especially in a sport where all is about X's and O's. I'm glad that over the years working for IBM I learned a lot about transformation, change and I was lucky to spend time in the UCN program. I knew the tools and methods I could use when starting to ask the Why? so why not use them outside of the business space.

Initially I wanted to get this all into one post, now I think it needs a second post. In the next post I will take you with me on how I change the way I worked to change the way the team was engaged with the overall situation. It will be about commitment, goal definition and accountability as well as where the hierarchy and not modern organisation format of football can make sense.

to be continued......