LEADER OF THE PACK
Great teams always include great captains. But it doesn't happen magically. Coaches can train their team leaders by explaining roles, providing opportunities, and giving feedback.
By Jeff Jansen
Jeff Janssen is Director of the Janssen Sports Leadership Center, in Cary, N.C., and a former athletic administrator at the University of Arizona. This article is an adapted excerpt from his book, The Team Captain’s Leadership Manual, and one of his Web sites: www.ChampionshipCoachesNetwork.com.
Your team captains can make or break your season.
If that sounds like an overstatement, think back over your coaching career. During your most successful seasons, I bet you had great team leaders. Now consider your most frustrating years. Did they include poor leaders?
And not only do your captains have a huge impact on your team’s success, but also on your sanity and your satisfaction as a coach. You’ll usually remember a year you had fantastic team leaders with a smile, regardless of the final record.
You rely on your captains to help set and uphold the standards of the squad, monitor team chemistry, and be your voice in the locker room and on the weekends when you’re not around. You need your captains to consistently reinforce the team’s standards and hold their teammates accountable.
At the same time, your captains depend on you for leadership, guidance, and support as they step up to their challenge. They rely on their coach to create a positive and productive environment that is conducive to helping them lead.
In other words, great team captains are made when both roles of the coach-captain equation are tended to. What can easily occur, however, is that one side becomes frustrated with the other.
Some coaches’ frustrations stem from a belief that the athletes of today don’t seem to have the strong leadership skills they did in past years. I often hear coaches lament, “Kids today don’t understand what it means to be a leader. They aren’t nearly as vocal as they need to be.” Another frequent complaint is, “They aren’t willing to stand up and confront their teammates when necessary.”
And captains don’t always feel they have the necessary guidance or support from their coaches. A recent poll I conducted of student-athletes revealed that over 60 percent of captains felt their coaches needed to do a better job of working with them. In essence, captains complain that too many coaches preach the need for athlete leadership but don’t teach it.
Rather than both sides blaming the other, they must make the effort to work together and forge a strong coach-captain partnership. I like to think of it as a leadership team. When coaches and captains are on the same page and leading together as a unified front, great things can happen in your program.
Starting on the Right Foot
Spending time at the very start of the season working with your captains builds the basis for this leadership team. To be on the same page, you need to talk through what being a team captain means and how to be an effective one.
Step number one is to clarify your expectations of them. Many coaches simply say to their captains, “You’re our leader. I expect you to step up and lead.” But this alone is too vague to give proper direction.
Rather than assuming your captains understand their duties as well as your philosophy and expectations, sit down and clarify what you need from them. Create a job description of the eight to 10 priorities you expect them to handle. (See “Job Description” at right.) Clarification of their roles and responsibilities on the front end will prevent misunderstandings as the season goes on.
Next, discuss the risks and challenges of leadership. Let your captains know that this new responsibility might be difficult and demanding at times. They will encounter many gray areas and bumps along the way, and they should understand that these challenges are a normal part of leadership. Most importantly, let them know that you will be there to support them through thick and thin.
From there, ask your captains to describe what they think it means to be an effective leader. Their ideas of leadership might be quite different than yours. Ask them to talk about the leaders whom they respect in their lives and why, and the ones they don’t respect and why. This will give you insight into their model of leadership and can start great discussions that get you both on the same page.
It can also be helpful to provide your captains with an assessment of their leadership style. Just as each athlete has certain physical strengths and weaknesses, so do leaders. I use a two-part evaluation that rates how a person leads by example and vocally, in several areas, from composure to team builder. (See page XX for a Web link to the survey.) This type of analysis can help make the captains aware of their strengths and weaknesses in their leadership qualities.
Encourage your captains to utilize and maximize their strengths and acknowledge areas to improve in. For example, some of your leaders might have a hard time confronting their teammates when necessary. Or, some of your leaders may be too blunt and lack the necessary tact to get their messages across well. Whatever the challenge, encourage them to make sure that their weaknesses are not a leadership liability as they work to improve them.
Throughout these discussions, let your leaders know how important they are to the program. Don’t be afraid to tell them how much you will rely on them to set the standards, keep the team focused, and handle conflicts. You may even want to tell them that it is “their” team. You will be there to help them, but ultimately it’s the athletes—particularly the leaders—who determine how far the team will go.
Provide Opportunities
While talking about their responsibilities is important, your captains need continual opportunities to make real leadership decisions. It often works well to start small and build up to more complicated tasks.
For example, let them run warm-ups before practice and make any team announcements. Have them contact teammates to inform them of schedule changes. You can even let them lead practice drills, or take it a step further, and let them plan a practice from time to time.
It’s also key to solicit your captains’ input on team decisions. These can be minor choices like where to eat after a match or major decisions like discipline situations. The more responsibility and input you allow them, the better leaders they will become.
You can also suggest they seek other leadership opportunities outside your team. Encourage them to run for student council, nominate them for the athletic department’s Student-Athlete Advisory Council, get them involved in a Captain’s Council, and encourage them to sign up for community service opportunities.
In addition, there are more and more leadership conferences for student-athletes put on every year by state and national governing bodies. Ask your athletic director for funds so that your captains can attend such meetings.
A Team Effort
By discussing leadership roles and giving your captains lots of practice, you’ll lay the groundwork to become a leadership team. But there are more steps you can take to really get the teamwork going.
One is to ask your captains to help you track the pulse of the team. Every coach knows that teams are constantly in a state of flux—one day the chemistry might be great and the next there could be major drama. One game your athletes might be confident and on track and the next they are intimidated and tentative. Some players are content with their roles while others are boiling below the surface.
Because your captains are the heart and soul of your team, talk with them often to get their insights on your team’s vital signs. Ask them to help you monitor if the team is healthy and strong, has a case of the sniffles, or needs to be rushed to the ER immediately.
Another step is to teach them to be a coach on the court. During the match, there is only so much you can do from the sidelines and your captains should be entrusted to remind their teammates of the game plan, reassure them when they face adversity, and refocus them when they get distracted.
Talk with your captains about their role as “momentum managers” on match day. They are in charge of creating a positive momentum for the match by building their teammates’ confidence, focusing them on the game plan, and encouraging them to play their role effectively. Then, when they encounter difficulties during a match, it’s your captains’ job to monitor the momentum swing and keep the team focused.
Working together on leadership skills is another great way to build up your captains. For example, ask them to participate with you in this drill: Each of you identifies two people on the team who, for whatever reason, you have not yet developed a good connection or working relationship with. Once you identify these two people, you each make an effort over the course of the next two weeks to begin building a better relationship with them. This can mean taking the initiative to talk with them, work out with them, have lunch with them, and so forth.
After two weeks, have a meeting with your captains to discuss how you’re each doing with the challenge. This teaches your captains that the strength of their leadership depends on the quantity and quality of connections they have with all athletes. It also teaches them that you’re all in this together.
Because being part of a team means supporting each other, always be there for your leaders. Being a captain is an extremely challenging job, especially for teenagers and young adults, and they need solid support from you. They will have internal and external struggles throughout the season. They will be torn between meeting your expectations and their desire to be liked and accepted by their teammates. Understand this and help them work through it.
Finally, take time to let your leaders know how much you appreciate their help. A sincere “thank you” from time to time will do wonders to maintain your captains’ morale and motivation. However, be careful not to praise them too frequently in front of teammates as that can breed resentment.
Plan for the Future
While focusing on this year’s team captains, don’t forget to begin building leadership skills in younger players. Identify athletes who have the potential to develop into leaders for your team and give them some small responsibilities to see how they handle them. Also, encourage potential leaders to learn what to do and what not to do from your more experienced and established leaders.
And, all along the way, be conscious of how you model effective leadership as you coach the team. Your prospective and current team leaders will learn infinitely more about leadership by your actions than by what you preach to them. Be sure that you are just as demanding, if not more, of your own leadership skills as you are of your captains.
What will be the result of all the above efforts? You will create formidable leadership operating in an environment of honesty and trust that has a powerful influence on the culture and direction of the team. As a coach, you must take the initiative to reach out to your captains to create and sustain this important partnership. Remember, if you want your captains to be extensions of you, you must extend yourself to them.
You can evaluate your leaders using the “Team Leadership Evaluation” by visiting: www.jeffjanssen.com/coaching/evaluation2.html.
You can order The Team Captain’s Leadership Manual by calling (888) 721-TEAM or visiting: www.ChampionshipCoachesNetwork.com.
More resources for team captains can be found at Janssen’s Web site: www.teamcaptainsnetwork.com.
