Aligning your values and behaviours

Historical processes of developing and educating coaches can often find it challenging to take account of the individual characteristics of the coaches it supports and the context specific idiosyncrasies of the players involved.

This is evident in standardised assessment protocols, the central prescribing of assessment themes and the biases of coach educators who can perceive greater value in coaches who model the behaviours that closely align with theirs.

Seeking to understand the things that a coach (or club) values or believes to be true, how those values align with their objective(s) and the subsequent behaviours and activities that they strategically employ to achieve their objective, whilst living their values, could form an alternative way of thinking about coach development.

Beginning by asking coaches to think about the things that they value generates an opportunity to delve deep into aspects that are fundamentally important to them and consider why they believe them to be important.

The last three years has seen an individual commitment to understand the collective and individual qualities that clubs and coaches value and then working with them to bring them to life in their coaching practice. This combines coaches achieving formal FA coaching qualifications whilst developing a deeper understanding of themselves, their players and the environment they collectively populate and enabling me to stay true to the things that both I and The FA value to be important.

Collaboration

Working with others to complete a task and achieve shared goals

I have recently been doing some coach development work with two coaches working through their FA Advanced Youth Award from different clubs. They work in the same age phase and are both bright, curious characters with open minds. They wanted to challenge their players to be able to adapt to different problems that the game presented and asked if we could look at some work around problem solving. The initial thought was to do a workshop on problem solving, with explicit content about what problem solving is and ‘how we do it’.

Collectively, we agreed that it may be more effective if we looked at some tactical problems that the players and their coaches could tackle together so that football was the ‘workshop’ and problem solving the, more implicit, ‘teaching approach’. This provided a framework to guide instead of a prescribed situation that can chain a coach’s creativity. These problems could be built individually by the coaches (and their players) using the following problem solving framework:

• Select a moment in the game
  • in possession
  • out of possession
  • transition.
• Select a system/formation
  • 4-4-2
  • 3-5-2
  • 4-3-3
  • 4-4-2 diamond.
• Identify individual player characteristics, for example, a forward who comes short or a full back who struggles defending against wrong footed wide players.

The first coach selected a 4-4-2, out of possession and two central midfielders who he wanted to practice defending against opponents who play three centrally. His coaching opponent then set her team up to challenge this – she selected a 3-5-2 (her only requirement being to ensure she had three central midfielders). They then had a game and helped their players to solve the problems that the game presented using a range of individual, unit and team coaching behaviours.

Social courage

The state or quality of mind enabling a person to face danger, fear, or vicissitudes with self-possession, confidence, and resolution.

This coach was completing their A Licence and coaches one of the older age-groups in a large, well respected professional club’s academy programme. He aspired for the young men to develop the capacity to ‘call each other out’ if they weren’t committed and in unity to doing their best (this sounds trite, but when you think about, doing your best is incredibly hard). The coach, quite powerfully, believed that social courage went much deeper than shaking hands and looking each other in the eye.

He cleverly combined small-sided games which had a tactical focus around when and where to press with the players being bold enough to call each other out if they fell below the expected standards (an example of a session with multiple learning outcomes across more than one of the four corners).

16 players paired themselves up - in the first two ten-minute games they paired with a team-mate they were close to, in the third and fourth games it was with a different team-mate. Eight players played and eight observed their partners. If one of the observing players saw an example of the player working or playing below the standard they knew they could uphold, they called them out and replaced them on the pitch.

Fascinatingly, different players responded to this in varying ways – some nodded acceptance, some visibly disagreed but relented and changed whilst others ignored their partner and carried on playing (which generated its own challenges). From this, the coach tailored his interventions to support the players if they were disrespectful to their partner (‘call them out and maintain mutual respect’) and to help them to consider positive responses to being called out.

The observing coach doing the peer assessment noted that if he’d done that with his players then a war would have started; the response was – “Yes, if that’s the case then the environment isn’t right”. His belief was that if challenging each other to be better is part of developing high level performers, the group should employ behaviours to cultivate this and then consciously work at it – an example of a coach aligning his behaviour to the values believed to be important.

Creativity

The ability to transcend traditional ideas to create meaningful new ones

The coach development work referenced in the two examples here were elements of ‘assessment’ as part of formal coaching qualifications and, as alternative approaches to the traditional approach to assessment, can be frowned upon as breaking the rules.

If we value creativity and hope to develop creative players and coaches to continue the evolution of our game then it may be helpful to recognise that we need to break the rules sometimes and that it may not receive universal agreement. If we ask for permission, we’re unlikely to get it. However, once we break the rules, it works and others see that it makes sense - it becomes part of the new rules, which can’t be broken. If we wait for someone to give us the green light we’ll never get into trouble; we won’t be ‘wrong’ but we’ll never do anything exciting either.

Those interested in the importance of aligning and living values for success may wish to look at the work of Pernilla Ingelsson, John Kotter and James Heskett.

This article was first published in The Boot Room magazine in April 2016.