THIS WEEK’S BLOG -> One Simple Exercise To 10X the Growth of Your Staff.
READ -> This is a short, encouraging read “Six Traits of Life-Changing Teachers”
LISTEN -> Do you want to inspire more than motivate? There needs to be both in leadership but far too often inspiration is an afterthought. Listen to this 21-minute inspiring podcast about inspiration.
VERSE -> Proverbs 18:2 “A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion.”
One Exercise to 10X The Development of Your Staff
One of the biggest challenges for head coaches is to develop their staff. This is hard for several reasons.
One of the main hurdles is time. With practice planning and practice, recruiting, leading student-athletes, dealing with administration, and the other hundred things head coaches are juggling, there never seems to be enough time.
And on top of a lack of time… “Do I really need to develop and manage adults?” (By the way… the answer is a resounding ‘Yes’)
There can also be a lack of knowing how to develop your assistants. One coach I work with very candidly and honestly said to me one day “I am not even sure what it looks like to develop my assistants. I want to do it, but not sure where to start.”
In this blog post, I want to give one simple exercise to 10X the growth of your assistants.
Learning Loop
Richard Feynman, a Noble prize-winning physicist developed a learning technique.
This learning process or learning loop consists of 4 steps.
Step one: Gather information about what you want to learn.
Step two: Teach it (pretending you are having to teach it to sixth graders)
Step three: Identify gaps in your knowledge, understanding, and teaching.
Step four: Review, reflect, and simplify.
I share this to give a grid on how to better develop yourself and your assistants.
Staff School
One of the best ways to develop your assistants is to create consistent times where they have to teach. I call it ‘staff school’… you can call it whatever you want.
It is a super simple idea that can have a massive impact on you and your staff and can be easily adjusted to fit your situation.
Teach
Consistently ask one of your staff members to pick a topic (or you can pick one for them) and then require them to teach the staff on that topic.
I have heard that Shaka Smart did this with his staff at Virginia Commonwealth University. His staff would have to create a PowerPoint and teach the rest of the staff on a certain topic, like “keys to breaking the press”.
Feedback
After the presentation is done, create time for Q&A and feedback. This time for questions and feedback is critical in this learning loop. If this aspect is not taken seriously, this exercise will not be as effective. Ask good questions. Give honest feedback.
That’s it! Super easy. Nothing fancy. Two parts; teach then give honest feedback. This one exercise will 10X the growth of you and your staff.
When To Do This
You can do this at the beginning of staff meetings. It doesn’t have to be a 45 minutes presentation. It can be a short 10-minute presentation.
The goal is not to create an elaborate process but rather to create simple opportunities to teach.
Benefits
There are many benefits to this exercise.
- The person teaching has to know what he/she is talking about.
- He/she has to be able to clearly and succinctly articulate the information.
- The feedback and Q&A will help expose the gaps and give an opportunity to reorganize and simplify.
- This exercise will force us to wrestle with the information… which order should it be taught in, what needs to be included, what needs to be left out, what gets prioritized, etc.
- The rest of the staff has to think critically so they can ask questions that help the teacher. Questions are a superpower in learning.
- The rest of the staff learns a concept or idea.
- As a leader, you speed up the learning curve of your assistants.Everyone wins!
My Experience
Often times we think we know something, only to open our mouths to talk about or teach it and we quickly realize we don’t know it at all.
This happened to me with the first baseball camp I led. I thought I knew pitching, until I opened my mouth. What proceeded out of my mouth was gibberish and mush.
As I did more and more lessons and camps I got better and better at teaching what I knew and what I was learning. The key was simply getting my reps in. When you teach it you actually learn the information on a different level. You are also forced to synthesize and simplify your thoughts into coherent sentences.
“Force” your assistants to teach. It will speed up their learning curve!
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