Coaching unlocks potential. From my perspective, all leaders should have a coaching philosophy because coaching is one of the best ways to cultivate self-awareness, unleash empathy, and foster personal accountability for taking action.
Whether I am coaching my kids’ soccer and basketball teams or empowering a colleague to solve a problem, bringing a coach approach to my worklife is also a strategy that leaders can use to create more leaders (or at least more awesome tiny humans). In fact, the coach training I’ve received for basketball and soccer highlighted the importance of coaching (instead of telling) by letting kids play and then highlighting a few skills with questions like “what do you notice about space right now?” or “where could you move to get open for a pass?”. We can replicate this practice across our careers and communities.
During one training experience, the coaches were also encouraged to create a coaching philosophy that will inform how we help kids practice and play (for the record, I think mine aligns with my job, too). The coaches were asked to reflect on two questions:
- What is the experience that you want athletes to have?
- How do you want athletes to describe you?
Based on these questions (as well as research into my practice and feedback about it) I created a coaching philosophy that is focused mostly on basketball (because that’s the sport I coach), but it works for my coaching practice in worklife, too.
These are the philosophical components of my coaching philosophy (using a sports team context):
- Sport is connection: teamwork makes the dreamwork and the ball has energy, so when we share the ball we benefit from its shared energy
- Sport is growth: cultivating human potential is more important than winning games
- Sport is progress, not perfection: there will be mistakes and we will learn from them
- Sport is chasing perfection: to be great we must understand that practice doesn’t make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect
- Sport is joyful: playing with joy makes confidence contagious
These are principles and playing style elements of my coaching philosophy:
- These are the keys to the game:
- We are relentless pests
- Activity creates opportunity
- Sharing is caring
- Every time we step on the court we…
- Have fun
- Give the best possible effort
- Show what it means to be a great teammate!
Changing the word “sport” to “work” or “worklife” shifts this coaching philosophy from the pitch and hardwood to campus or the office. I hope it reflects how my teammates describe me (except maybe the pest part … but I do like being relentless when it comes to growing talent and improving how work gets done).
What is your coaching philosophy? Or what is an approach to coaching that brings out the best in you and your community?
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This article was originally published on October 26, 2022 – it holds up super-well and I made some revisions and adjustments based on my growth and reflections as a coach over the last few years. Check out this article about leadership agility for specific examples of what I’ve learned.
