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AFM Magazine

AFM Magazine


Leadership in Football

by: Richard Klimushko
Defensive Coordinator, University of Alberta (Canada)
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What do the names Lombardi, Landry, Walsh, and Dungy all have in common? They are the names of football coaches who were innovative in implementing and teaching new strategies and tactics but they were also great team leaders. What was it about their attention to the details of the game that required hard work, dedication and focus that led them to some of the best winning percentages in the history of the National Football League? In their own way, each one of these coaches truly cared about their player’s long-term interests despite showing it in drastically different ways. With Lombardi, he pushed his players to the brink of cruelty because he believed that a man’s toughness was his greatest asset. For Landry and Dungy it was their devout faith that taught them to look beyond a player’s physical ability to become aware of each individual’s limitless potential. Whereas, Bill Walsh established an example through coaching and believed that the most critical element of being successful was to take a personal interest in each individual player. What these coaches all shared is a care and consideration for their athletes that extended beyond a players ability to win football games.

In the world of big-business sports, coaches are led to rely on scientific training principles as their only means for heightened athletic performances. As coaching becomes a profession of transients, the coach becomes increasingly focused on the singular goal of winning games. In such a system, the athlete is viewed merely as a means to the coaches’ end to win games and the player slowly loses his personal identity, becoming a first, second or scout team player. It is by becoming aware of our individual athletes drives and insecurities, rather than diminishing their differences, that the football coach can lead his athletes to new heights of performance and achievement. It is through consideration that will motivate players to begin their focus on the goals of the team and divert their attention from thinking about themselves and their fears and insecurities. It should be noted that the best coaches are already accomplishing this through organizing practices down to the finer details to maximize efficiency and account for each player’s task. This is a good start but like any off-season training programs, you need to use variability in how you instill these practices to boredom, mental and mechanical performances. By engaging in leadership practices that continually force the athlete to engage his full attention for practices and drills, it will result in more deliberate practices and ultimately to heightened competitive performance.

Research Review

Leadership research has been divided into two types - either transactional or transformation, depending on the goals emphasized by the leader. Transactional leadership represents an exchange relationship between the leader and follower where something of value is traded between two people; the coach defines the roles and expectations and, in return for complying, the athlete receives increased playing time, status or a more lucrative contract. This is considered a rational approach to leadership because it represents how a supervisor is expected to deal with subordinates in a factory or industrial setting. On the other hand, transformational leadership attempts to go beyond exchange relationships and seeks to transform the way subordinates view their role and responsibility to the organization. In theory, by making each member feel as an important and contributing member of the group, they will begin to see their personal needs as coinciding with those of the team and, consequently, will lead to heightened levels of satisfaction, motivation and performances (Bass, 1985).

Bass (1985), a leading proponent of leadership research, conceptualized transactional and transformational leadership to be bi-polar and to occupy opposite ends of a continuum. The various theories of leadership that emerged over the last century, from ‘Great Man,’ trait, behavioral, situational, and interactional models represent transactional theories and the left side of this continuum. Transformational theories, which include charismatic, inner, servant, ethical, and moral leadership, occupy the right side of this continuum. The overwhelming majority of leadership research elucidates how transformational leadership leads to increased levels of athlete motivation and achievement when compared to traditional forms of leadership. However, as high-performance coaches tend to remain ‘stuck’ in relying on transactional modes of leadership, their only means for improving player performances are linked to the small increments they can make through the scientization of practices, i.e., tweaking off and in-season conditioning programs, implementing tighter constraints on how they organize and structure players time and space, etc. But what the research is identifying is how coaches need to focus more on changing the way they think about their athletes, from objects to be manipulated and controlled to thinking more of them as young men with dreams, thoughts and insecurities.

The important aspect about transactional and transformational leadership to be gleaned by football coaches is that transactional leadership represents those areas dominated by the scientization of practice. That is, the periodization of training, structuring and organizing practices that prescribe routines based on mechanical efficiency that gives little consideration for the mental or emotional state of the athlete. In turn, transformational leadership is demonstrated by a relationship between the coach and athlete that is based on trust, care and consideration for each other’s long-term best interests. It is clear that some of the NFL’s greatest coaches mentioned in the opening paragraph had both a broad understanding of the game as well as the ability to relate to their athletes.

As football coaches, we tend to rely more on transactional practices because they are much easier to implement. They are usually based on our own years of experience as participants and coaches in the game. But even the most traditional coach occasionally engages in some level of transformational leadership. In the examples of Lombardi, Landry, Walsh, and Dungy, they worked tirelessly in devising the schemes and strategies to beat their opponents yet, underlying their intense drive and motivation was a consideration and understanding of their athlete’s strengths and inadequacies. This may be the reason why they all enforced the ideals of hard work, teamwork and discipline, believing these to be character traits that would benefit their players beyond their professional careers. That these coaches never accepted defeat is well documented but what they all seemed to have in common was knowing that the difference between winning and losing was mental and it was the lessons they enforced from week-to-week that made all the difference on Sunday. Whether they realized it or not, these coaches were engaging in transformational leadership behavior because of the focused effort and attention they encouraged daily in each player.

In behavioral studies conducted on successful elite level coaches from the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), researchers found that over 63% of their coaching behaviors reflected transactional leadership while only 13% of behavior reflected transformational leadership practices (Bloom, Crumpton & Anderson, 1999). Although these studies only account for coaching behaviors during practice, it demonstrates the disparity between these two forms of leadership and how there is room to implement more transformational or considerate forms of practice into coaching. As transformational leadership is represented through athlete consideration, the research should influence coaches to structure practices in ways that heighten player attention and focus ultimately on improving their performances. Consideration requires coaches’ step away from the familiar way of doing things and develop practice plans and structures that are more directly based on a consideration of their athletes’ needs and development.

Practical Application to Practice

But how do coaches become more aware of their athletes’ needs that results in increased levels of consideration and, ultimately, to transformational leadership? Through analyzing the evolution of leadership theory, it is apparent that improved player performances should be cultivated through increased leader consideration. As studies of the NCAA showed, it should be the goal of coaches to continue their emphasis on strategies and tactics but to coach them in a manner that prevents player fear and insecurity through coach reprimands. Instead, coaches need to teach techniques and tactics in ways that cultivate player confidence, security and a belief in a unified and idealized vision for the team. The single most important way a coach can increase athlete consideration is through using a journal to reflect on their experiences in coaching.

The process of reflection is accomplished through keeping a journal and writing thoughts down on a daily or semi-daily basis about your personal coaching practices, your player’s reactions to them and overall team performance and efficiency. It is through such a systematic approach that coaches can become increasingly aware of their influence on their athletes and lead them to make changes that influence performance in more positive ways. According to Gilbert and Trudel (2006), “10 years in coaching without reflection is simply one year in coaching repeated ten times”. A journal enables coaches to begin the process of thinking about one’s own practices and leads to insights about how our actions are affecting our athletes in both positive and negative ways.

In my own reflections as an assistant collegiate coach, I was surprised to find that I was much more focused on developing and preserving my own coaching image than I was about developing my athletes. In fact, through my journal, I saw the development of my athletes closely linked to my credibility, real or otherwise, that I presented to them in being their coach. My journal highlighted how I was more focused on my own position and status on the team than I was on developing the techniques and practices that would lead my athletes to improved performances. It was not apparent to me while I was coaching but in reflecting on my journal it was evident that I was wasting a great deal of time and energy on worrying about and manipulating how players and coaches perceived me. For this reason, I realized that I was relying on the same coaching practices that I had always used as a coach and that were familiar to me. I used the same coaching practices that my collegiate coach had used on me and I was now passing this off on my players as the only way to do things while it forced me away from looking for alternative practices to improve their performances. This also perpetuated the creation on my own personal defense mechanism, in which the same old practices led me to blame any inadequacies on my players and led me away from questioning my practices. Instead, I adopted the stance that, if it was good enough for me, then it was good enough for them and if they couldn’t make the cut they weren’t good enough.

Conclusion

It was through gaining the insight from my journal that led me to change my practices and to realize that I needed to focus more on the development of my athletes and less on the development and preservation of my own image. The following season in coaching I was beginning to define a new path in the way I coached my athletes which led me to more deliberate practices to meet their needs. In making my own concerns of secondary importance, my athletes began to believe that I had their best interests in mind and they were more motivated and focused with how they approached every rep in every drill in every practice. It was this approach, in putting aside my own self-interests, that led to the accelerated development and performances of my athletes.

It is through engaging in reflective practices and critiquing your long-standing practices as a coach that will lead to increased insights and awareness about how you can more deliberately impact the performances of your players. Simply repeating the same skills and drills year after year leads to unfocused and mechanical efforts by your athletes that will ultimately degrade and undermine the heightened performance that every coach strives for. By becoming acutely aware of your influence through reflection, you will begin more transformational practices that will inevitably lead your players to new heights of performance.








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