For the last few months I’ve been coaching my oldest son’s soccer team. He’s five years old and his teammates are around the same age. As you can imagine, the experience combines adorableness and fun with chaos and frustration. Weirdly enough, some of my learnings are applicable to my day-to-work of leading the team tasked with finding and developing talent for my organization. Here are five management lessons from coaching youth soccer.
Have a vision
Our team has a very straightforward philosophy: get the ball. I can’t stress enough how critical it is to have a shared understanding of your team’s purpose when your players are four or five years old. Focus can be elusive, and peoples’ skills range from butterfly-watching to young-Messi.
My favourite thing about our vision is that it is starting to define how the team plays – for the most part, we bring a lot of energy to the pitch, which is a skill that will serve the kids in their work and life because having contagious energy is possibly the greatest ability anyone can develop.
Keep it simple
After sharing our team’s vision – get the ball – I often hear the following rejoinder: “…and then keep the ball!” My reply to this assumption is consistently, “no, that’s too complicated.” The kids run around the field in clusters of gleeful stomps and kicks and the parents cheer loudly when someone completes a pass (to date we’ve successfully completed two crosses and one give-and-go, which was probably an accident).
I have a knack for overcomplicating things because I like to meet complex problems, like finding talent in one of the world’s most competitive markets or creating an organizational learning culture, where they’re at and create solutions that match. According to Fast Company’s Biz Stone, simple solutions take time to build, but pay off in the long term because they’re more likely to be accepted and implemented by the people using the:
Keeping things simple means letting go. It means giving up some control to the people who are going to use what you’re building. Build the basics and as people use it, you’ll discover two things. First, you’ll find out where the value is. Second, you’ll find out what’s missing. Then you iterate.
Customize and adapt
When I asked some veteran-youth-soccer-coach-colleagues for advice on my new gig, I consistently heard a version of “one-size-fits-one” coaching. The same approach won’t work for each player, so coaching needs to be customized to suit the players’ unique needs. Some kids literally can’t stop running, others need some motivation to chase the ball. Some kids will probably never complete a pass this season, others are burgeoning attacking midfielders. They all need coaching that meets them where they’re at to be as engaged and included as possible.
Inclusive managers figure out the unique motivations of individuals and can align them with the larger purpose of the team. Strong recruiters can identify the special things about an organization that will engage a prospective candidate and make these attributes part of the employment value proposition.
Ask for help
Coaching four- and five-year olds can be overwhelming. Especially after a day of work or on a Saturday morning. Our community of parents is incredible. From assistant coaching, project managing and bringing delicious snacks to the matches, our team is chock full of eager helpers who make life easier.
Asking for help is a tricky thing for leaders. We want to role model and demonstrate competence (it’s what got us here, after all). Our teams also want to showcase their capability and expertise. Author Gregg Levoy argues that when we ask for help our colleagues and teammates not only recognize it as a an admission that you’re ready for action, but they will also take ownership to help because they’re choosing to participate, as opposed to being told what to do. Being vulnerable also accelerates trust on teams and fosters psychological safety.
Embrace the chaos
A few weeks ago, our team hit a self-described pinnacle of excellence (described by Assistant Coach Brad and I). Passes were completed. There were valiant attempts at making space. Goal celebrations lasted for an acceptable amount of time. We maybe only scored on our own net twice. We were noticing progress.
Last weekend everything was a clustered blob of kicks and tumbles. Hugs and side-conversations lasted minutes. We probably regressed.
The worst thing that I could probably do in this case is take things too seriously because it’s kids soccer. At times, however, your worklife will be chaotic – people will resign or go on leave, demands and deadlines will overlap with each other, budgets will be cut, and then you’ll get a call from your kid’s school… Being able to navigate chaos and cope with changes or decisions beyond your control are critical elements of leading teams and building a successful career in a fast-changing world.
Have fun with it
If you can’t have fun helping kids run around outside and play sports or work with joy on a team then what are we doing here? Unleashing creativity and collaborating to unlock the potential of people and ideas are what human beings crave.
Kids need very little motivating to bring joy to the soccer pitch on a Saturday morning. How might we channel the same enthusiasm for our next grey Monday filled with spreadsheets and meetings?