Coaching at Work

If I had a dollar for every time I heard “There is no I in team.” from a coach, I’d be almost as rich as someone who went pro.  I have very fond and vivid memories of the sports that I played throughout my youth.  I remember the coaches I had and the teammates I played with.  My love for soccer started in second grade when I played on my first organized team, and basketball started when I was in sixth grade.  I played both sports through high school and I genuinely loved being on the field or the court.  My experiences there and my love for all sports helped mold how I viewed leadership during those years and influences how I currently view it now.

The first time I started supervising people was late in undergrad when I ran an orientation team. I had been on the team, but I had never been in charge of the team.  Admittedly I was intimidated.  How do I manage a group of people when I’ve never done this before?  As I struggled to figure it out in the weeks before the first meeting, that’s when it hit me.  Just do what your coaches did to get people to work together.  It was then that I began to fuse my love of sports and leadership together. 

Before I knew it, I found myself coaching not on a court but coaching in the workplace.  The ghosts of coaches past and all the words of wisdom that they utilized to inspire us to play were now being rebranded by me as I supervised my team of employees.  (Minus a few locker room expletives which of course weren’t appropriate for a work environment.)  Throughout my time supervising, my leadership style has been refined.   I have been faced with challenging and easy teams to work with, but getting them to perform, and achieve greatness became my new ‘winning the game’. 

I have to admit, I’m always thinking of leadership and how it plays out, so I was touched by a shirt that I saw while walking in the mall one day.  It said “There is no ‘I’ in team, but there is a ‘me’.”  Instantaneously I had a dramatic revelation of how this would be my new mantra as a supervisor.  It would also become what I would instill in training those I supervised on how to supervise their own staff teams.

It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that you can’t be a leader without followers.  As a supervisor you have to be a good leader for your staff to buy into your vision and mission.  But you have to start with yourself.  You have to buy into your vision and mission and be a role model for them before you can get anyone else to buy in and follow what you expect of them.  Therefore like the t-shirt says, it starts with me. 

When the staff doesn’t perform, the blame typically falls on the leader and the whole team has a bad name.  Much like we see coaches in sports who have a losing team, more often than not, everyone holds that coach responsible for the team losing.  He/she gets dragged through the mud with the team’s name because they are a part of the team too.  The drive to be better should not only be an extrinsic force coming from the fans.  The drive to be better needs to be an intrinsic force as well coming from within.  That coach needs to look within and take a step to make the team better.
The mind blowing part is that this doesn’t only go for the supervisor/coach, but this goes for the staff/team members as well.  I remember sharing with a staff I supervised that “We as a team can only be as good as the weakest player”.  It was imperative for my staff to know that we are all in this together.  Think about any time you’ve worked on a team.  We have all been on a staff before where someone likes to take all the credit for when great things happen.   As soon as something bad happens they shirk the blame stating what they’ve done right, and like a weather vane in the wind, their finger starts pointing in all sorts of directions trying to distribute responsibility for the failure.  People who do this believe that the success is mine, but the failure is yours.  But as I stated before the team is only as good as the weakest player. 

So when you dissect the phrase on the t-shirt, it is saying that each employee and their supervisor need to look within and instead of saying “But I did…” they all need to take a look in the mirror saying “the success of this team starts with me.”  If everyone on the team approaches their work ethic in that way, people will begin taking responsibility for helping each other and the entire team where they see it necessary.  Instead of just complaining and letting things slide. , there will be more unity, ownership and empowerment in the workplace.  With this approach it becomes less of a bragging situation of look at what I did right, to one where people feel a sense of responsibility saying it is up to me to figure out how I can help my team be better.