Do you communicate effectively with your team?
Everyone will agree that your ability to communicate with your players is a key ingredient to your team’s success. But how exactly do you know if you are doing it well?
One way to find out is to answer these three questions objectively and honestly.
1. What Do Your Players Want?
That’s easy to answer. Providing what they want, however, is difficult to accomplish. The volume of what players want to know is vast. And for the most part, they want to know more than you are willing to tell them.
But the most basic information players want revolves around questions that start with the word “when.” When is practice, when are games, when are their classes, when are they supposed to be at team meetings, when are meals, when does the bus leave, when do they have time to study or go to a tutor?
Players also want feedback. They want to know how you think they are doing. Do you have a mechanism to provide players with objective, useful information about their performance? Most likely, you collect information by tracking or grading players after each training session or game. Or you collect data from players about different factors involving their performances. What do you do with it? Could that information be helpful to each player? Do you have an easy way to share it with them? Raise your hand if you are still posting information on a bulletin board. You do it because you have yet to find a better way.
Players also want a way to communicate with you on a regular basis, and they might not want to, or have time to, make an appointment to meet you in the often-intimidating and less-than-private office setting.
2. Are You Giving Players What They Want?
There is a very strong chance that one of your pet peeves is when people assume that since you are a coach, you work about five hours a day, and those five hours are spent watching videos, planning practice and running practice.
You’re busy, and managing your team is what takes most of your time. If you look at it honestly, you always feel you could be doing a better job. So the answer to this second question is mostly likely “no”.
Technology has helped you do more for your players. Emails can be useful when a lot of information needs to distributed. But are all the players reading them? Text messages are fine for quick communication and texts are more likely to be read. However, because of the sheer volume of texts sent and received throughout a typical day, they’re subject to being missed, or because of the informal nature of texts, forgotten. And you’ve probably had a few text that you plan to address later, but later never comes.
3. Why Not?
That, as it turns out, is a pretty good question. Why aren’t you communicating with your team better? Is it because you just don’t have the right tools?
Maybe it’s time check out DRIVN, which provides answers to all the challenges you face.