Full Commitment
How do you get everyone on your team fully committed?
There are 3 aspects of an elite culture that increase commitment and engagement.
Recognition is common.
Relationships are important.
Data-driven feedback is provided.
Recognizing your team or individual members is something that often gets lost in the coaching world. I know I have been guilty of it. You set a high standard and you expect your players to meet it, to do their job. It’s so easy to spend most of your energy on the guys who are making mistakes, and you take for granted the guys who consistently do their job well. At times, I would literally schedule myself to recognize players and the team, no matter how bad I felt about how things were going. You can’t overlook recognition if you want your team to remain committed.
Connection is also crucial. How are you making sure your relationship with your team is genuine, as well as making sure they are connecting to one another? You can be hard on your team and demand a lot out of them without bringing a negative tone every day.There is nothing as powerful as a team - or a teammate - knowing that you always have their back. No matter what. Make sure you are working on relationships, both with and within your team, every day.
Feedback is also a crucial support tool for your team’s commitment. You can use data to make sure your team is aware of what you value. If you want a team to be unselfish, track the number of passes you make on offense. Celebrate the extra pass, the hockey assist, or the great screen.
With my first championship team as a head coach at Rhode Island College, I used to ask them the day after a game if they could tell me who took the most shots on our team the night before. We just had a very unselfish group, and sometimes I would look at the box score after the game and be surprised that one of our guys off the bench who wasn’t necessarily a key offensive player led the team in shot attempts. Sometimes it took our players four or five guesses to figure out who took the most shots. It was data driven feedback that reinforced the commitment we were making to each other.
Full investment is essential for elite, high-performing teams, we all know that. Think about the specific ways you can take action steps to make sure you team if fully committed to each other and the task at hand.