The four dark sides of developing your people
Great leaders develop leaders. Average/poor leaders develop dysfunctional followers.
One common idea around coaching is "coaching tree."
Your "coaching tree" is the assistants that leave your program to become head coaches. You can even count former student-athletes who once played for you and are now coaching.
Essentially a coaching tree gives some evidence to the type of people you hire and the level at which you develop them.
One of the best-known "coaching trees" is Bill Walsh, former football coach with the San Francisco 49's. The two best-known names from Bill Walsh's tree are Mike Holmgren and George Seifert. Both of whom spun off a tree of their own including Jon Gruden and Andy Reid (Mike Holmgren) and Pete Carroll and Mike Shanahan (George Seifert).
If a leader only focuses on developing culture and strategy and fails to develop people...they will lower the ceiling on their program or organization.
Below are four errors that leaders make when leading their program and the subsequent fallout from these errors. (Credit for these four categories to Craig Groeschel)
- The Controlling leader often creates compliant followers. You can have control or growth, you can't have both.
- The Critical leader produces insecure followers. The critical leader gives blame, the elite leader takes responsibility
- The Avoiding leader creates disengaged followers. You can not correct what you will not confront.
- The Rescuing leader creates helpless followers. Stop rescuing. Once it stops, the growth begins.
None are what elite leadership looks like.
The question is not if we fall into one of these categories...the question is how often do we fall into one. We are all capable of becoming one of these dysfunctional leaders.
Get people around you who can call you out and up when you fall into one of these dysfunctions.
Click here to order my book The Leadership Greenhouse
One of my weekly disciplines is scouring the internet for articles/tweets I can learn from and/or use with those I work with. Below are two that I hope help encourage and equip you.
Article 1- Authenticity and transparency from an NFL head coach. (thanks to John Maupin for sending me this article)
Article 2- Internal standard...easy to talk about, really hard to actually get people to execute on.
Podcast: Lonnie Alameda, Softball coach at the Florida State. Elite leader. National Champion. Culture builder!
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Here is a testimony from a 1 on 1 client: "Travis has helped me become a better leader. Travis has helped me organize my thoughts and has given me so much clarity on how to lead on a day to day basis. There is no doubt that he is the biggest asset to my leadership and has reenergized my coaching style." Jeff Duncan, Head Baseball Coach, Kent State
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