I would like to start with a few sentences, this is an interesting exercise. Before taking the questionnaire assessment I always thought that Relationship is the most appealing as a leadership conception. The outcome is very close between all the topics. Speaking from experience I am a bit surprised that I have skill emphasis as the top. I also have an issue with such assessments, I believe they do not fully capture the full story. When you have questions, and you must rate 1-5 how one knows what weight 4 or 3 or 2 carry on the charts. I believe there should be a better way to capture an accurate result. I could be mistaken of course and subconsciously my conceptual realization to leadership is skill emphasis. The results are as follows:
Skill = 19; Relationship = 18; Ability, Behaviour, and Process = 16 and finally Trait = 15
I will still stand by what I believe consciously that to me Relationship is most important out of the other 5, relationship is not just a steppingstone to get to goal A or B it is not about making people feel good or better. It is a way to communicate, motivate and influence people to contribute effectively to the common goal.
Without this, one can still have some what success and demonstrate great leadership and leader traits, but you won’t have a passionate team or people that would be willing to go the extra mile for you. You will have a mediocre team/work force that will do the task. They will give the minimal effort of capacity and not their full potential. What we want and most organizations should want is a team/work force to go the extra mile to be more creative and out the box to give more than the minimum, if you are able to communicate and understand each other it is influential enough and motivational enough for anyone to provide and push their potential. With such one can know the people’s traits and their behaviour and either help to change bad ones or cut their losses.
I have seen it in my life that I am not the most skilled soccer coach nor player, I did not have the most skilled team. Yet we built a relationship together and we had an understanding. This made both them and me motivated to our best and above our minimal potential skills. We were rooted to go out of the U13 tournament from the group stages, yet we went the long distance even though we did not win the tournament and were only second place. We could not have done that without just skills.
In many top organizations even in the real world, for example the famous French playmaker Zidane was successful, and the club was successful, yet he left do the lack of leadership relationship that made him feel worthless and unsatisfied in his current position. So, an organization or team will be successful, but they will start to lose people and eventually crumble.
I believe all 5 topics are important, for me I still believe that relationship would be the most emphasized and important for the longer run.
The question is how does this relate to coaching? The relation to this and coaching is that coaches are in a leadership role they are role models to athletes. so this will determine how likely you are to view a good leader and determines how you as a coach deal with the player.
It can also translate to your style of coaching, for example in my case I contextualize leadership through relationships, my coaching style will involve high communication with my players, trying to get to know them off and on the pitch, have a more friends or peers relationship versus coach to player. Obviously there is time for “coaching” mode to be turned on and time when it needs to be turned off. At the end of the day the players are humans and need a level of communication and to be treated as HUMANS!
Not because they’re semi-pro or professional players they shut off all emotions and play it cool, it is not how it works. The perfect example is Cristiano Ronaldo, when in the previous match he stormed out. It makes sense he is human and has feelings, there should have been a better communication with such a high quality player, Spoilers there will be a different post on this topic soon!
Yet through sports you will see similar behaviour and it showcases that first and foremost players are human, which means there has to be some relationship established with them and communication to know what’s wrong and how we can fix it. in simple terms just be human, and that is true if you are a great coach or a great leader.
The visual above was created using Power BI.
If you would like to take the questionnaire assessment follow the link https://edge.sagepub.com/system/files/questionnaire_ch01_0.pdf! Please feel free to share your results before and after taking the questionnaire what you thought or believed was in line with the results?
Adventures in Life 