Beyond IQ: How Grit and Reflection Can Change the Way You Coach

Dr. Cory Dobbs (7/29/21)      (3 to 4 minutes reading)

Angela Duckworth has been one of the leading researchers and voices on the topic of “grit” –something  she defines as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.”  Duckworth has found that grit can be a powerful predictor of academic achievement and, of course, physical accomplishments.  She considers grit to be the behavioral and psychological ability of one to weather adversity and stay the course—willing to persevere in the short term for the longer term outcomes.  In her findings, she argues that achievement is not just a matter of raw intelligence or physical giftedness.  She suggests grit matters a great deal in all that we do. So the question arises can grit, through the practice of reflection, enhance coaching ability to reflect on events, relationships, and performance?

Several years ago a group of researchers were interested in understanding the importance of reflection to the processes of adult learning and leadership.  In their paper, “Learning by Thinking: How Reflection Aids Performance,“ the researchers reveal the importance of deliberate reflection to learning and leading through a series of experiments.

The researchers worked with small groups through a multi-week training program.  They broke the subjects into three groups.  First, they had a “reflection” group; they asked this group to spend the final 15 minutes of each day reflecting on what they had learned. The Second group was given the task of “sharing.”  This group spent 15 minutes reflecting, and then shared their thoughts with a peer for 5 minutes.  The third group, the control group, did not engage in any reflective activity.

The results aren’t surprising. The participants in the reflection group performed 22.8% better than the control group while the participants in the sharing group experienced a similar advantage over the control group participants. However, think for a moment about the work that you and your coaching staff do daily. What does the nitty-gritty look like?  Do you and your staff miss out on learning opportunities—those that will only emerge in the course of reflection?  Can you set aside 15-20 minutes for reflection and when possible include sharing in your coaching conversation?  Doing so will make your daily experience more productive and build confidence, individually and collectively, in learning by reflection.

Reflection is a powerful learning mechanism, so make time for deliberate conversation and reflection.  Reflection is an important coaching activity. Reflection is a skill that can be learned, developed, and practiced. If you want a sustainable advantage, take advantage of coupling learning by doing with intentional reflection.

New to the Second Edition of Coaching for Leadership!

We are pleased to announce a new chapter to the second edition of the best-selling Coaching for Leadership. The chapter, The Big Shift: Unlock Your Team’s Potential by Creating Player-Led Teambuilding, connects the previous edition of this book to its origin, as well as to the future of team sports.

The new chapter sets forth a practical and applicable agenda for change and improvement. The reader is introduced to seven vital elements of change; seven shifts of traditional mental models that lead to the new core principles necessary for creating a player-led team culture. Click here for more information about Coaching for Leadership

About Cory Dobbs, Ed.D.

Cory Dobbs is the founder of The Academy for Sport Leadership and a nationally recognized thought leader in the areas of leadership and team building.  Cory is an accomplished researcher of human experience. Cory engages in naturalistic inquiry seeking in-depth understanding of social phenomena within their natural setting.

A college basketball coach, Cory’s coaching background includes experience at the NCAA DII, NJCAA, and high school levels of competition.  After a decade of research and development Cory unleashed the groundbreaking Teamwork Intelligence program for student-athletics. Teamwork Intelligence illuminates the process of designing an elite team by using the 20 principles and concepts along with the 8 roles of a team player he’s uncovered while performing research.

Cory has worked with professional athletes, collegiate athletic programs, and high schools teaching leadership and team building as a part of the sports experience and education process.  As a consultant and trainer Dr. Dobbs has worked with Fortune 500 organizations such as American Express, Honeywell, and Avnet, as well as medium and small businesses. Dr. Dobbs taught leadership and organizational change at Northern Arizona University, Ohio University, and Grand Canyon University.

 

Leading a Group Through Losing
Written and contributed by Dr. Chris Hobbs ( Follow him on Twitter @Dr_ChrisHobbs)

My experiences in high school, college, and career have always revolved around athletics. As a result, my days almost always end with the stress of competition. There is a 50/50 chance that I will go home every evening dejected from a loss or exhilarated from a win. Even as an athletic administrator, this remains true as I feel many of these emotions on behalf of my coaches. This provides daily case studies on leadership that are crystal clear. The scoreboard has a way of making life pretty black and white. I have found that losing and struggle is where great leadership is most often demonstrated. Teams don’t really need their leader when it is going well. Teams are desperate for a leader when it is going poorly. I think this has a very easy application to teams of all kinds and losing of all kinds. Businesses, churches, non-profit organizations, and families will all experience the stress of losing. Here are 4 simple ways to lead well when it feels like you and your team are losing…

Be hopeful that better days are coming because they are. I am not talking about a faked, contrived, naïve insanity. I’m talking about a hope that comes from a commitment to keep pursuing mission and adapting plans that will yield better days. Along the journey, there will be bad days AND good days. Leaders find a way to look through the bad days knowing that good days will come back around. Remind your team of the mission, communicate changes to the plan to make the mission, and reassure them better days are coming…with a big smile on your face.

Bring the most energy when there is a lack of energy. In an athletic team setting, there are two people that have to be high energy every day: the head coach and the best player. If those two people are high energy, the group is likely to reach its fullest potential and pull through losing streaks.

The more people on your team, the more empowered they need to be by trust and loyalty. Insecurity flares fast when losing shows up. Teammates start pointing fingers, and stop communicating with each other. The leader should express belief in the abilities of the people that they are serving both privately and corporately.

Demonstrate determination to push through the losing streak. Losing makes you question whether or not the pursuit is worth it. With those questions comes the temptation to cut corners. Evaluate what you would do and how long you would do it if you were winning. You

Should do the exact same thing when you are losing. The people you lead are looking for either a reason to give in or an inspiration to keep going. The leader will be one or the other.

I want to close with an excerpt of a letter written by General George Marshall to another general. The letter is written more than two decades before General Marshall became famous for his leadership during World War II and was named Secretary of Defense under President Truman. It demonstrates General Marshall’s belief in how to lead when it appears the team is losing…

November 5, 1920
General John S. Mallory
15 University PlaceLexington, Virginia

My Dear General Mallory,
Last summer during one of our delightful rides I commented on the advice I would give a young officer going to war, based on my observation of what had constituted the success of the outstanding figures in the American Expeditionary Forces, and you asked me to write out what I had said. A discussion with Fox Conner this morning reminded me of my promise to do this, so here it is.

To be a highly successful leader in war four things are essential, assuming that you possess good common sense, have studied your profession and are physically strong.

When conditions are difficult, the command is depressed and everyone seems critical and pessimistic, you must be especially cheerful and optimistic.

When evening comes and all are exhausted, hungry and possibly dispirited, particularly in unfavorable weather at the end of a march or in battle, you must put aside any thought of personal fatigue and display marked energy in looking after the comfort of your organization, inspecting your lines and preparing for tomorrow.

Make a point of extreme loyalty, in thought and deed, to your chiefs personally; and in your efforts to carry out their plans or policies, the less you approve the more energy you must direct to their accomplishment.
The more alarming and disquieting the reports received or the conditions viewed in battle, the more determined must be your attitude.

Never ask for the relief of your unit and never hesitate to attack.
I’m certain in the belief that the average man who scrupulously follows this course of action is bound to win great success. Few seemed equal to it in this war, but I believe this was due to their failure to realize the importance of so governing their course.

Faithfully yours,

George C. Marshall

Major, General Staff Aide-de-Camp

‘Bite Down and Don’t Let Go’ is a collection of writings on being intentional about life in a way that produces great persistence. Read about it more here.

Dr. Chris Hobbs is an educational leader and Director of Athletics at The King’s Academy in West Palm Beach, Florida. He’s earned a few degrees and won some awards. He’s happily married to his high school sweetheart and they have three teenage children. Life is messy and complicated most of the time. You can follow him on Twitter for all sorts of inspirational thoughts and good laughs.

THE FORMULA FOR HIGH PERFORMANCE TEAM BUILDING

Dr. Cory Dobbs
The Academy for Sport Leadership

“Tell me and I will forget. Show me and I may remember. Involve me and I will care.” -Your Student-Athlete

Here’s a simple formula that should provide you a clear way to grasp high performance in the area of team leadership. High involvement plus high commitment equals high performance.

So, what does all this mean for you? Well, high involvement means you need to nurture the involvement of every team member. Did you get that—every team member. Each and every team member needs to engage with the leadership development process by bringing a high level of energy and focus. Only when you have high involvement can you entertain the idea of high commitment. Simply put, if you don’t have high involvement you can’t have high commitment, and if you don’t have high commitment you’ll never see high performance.

If you select only a few team captains you’ve willingly and knowingly chosen low involvement. Those student-athletes not selected to develop as leaders will not care much about the process of leadership development of their peers. They’ll clearly say by actions and non-actions, “Why bother, there’s nothing in it for me.” You’ve chosen not to get them directly involved and commitment comes from being involved.

Those student-athletes you’ve chosen as team leaders might show high commitment to leadership and leadership development. Why not, it benefits them. But you are still left with the reality that you don’t—and logically can’t have—high involvement with only a few chosen participants. Thus, you’ll never achieve high commitment nor high performance.

However, if you choose to involve everyone on the team—a leader in every locker—you have a chance to attain high commitment. By placing leadership practice and opportunities in the hands of every team member, you involve everyone. And depending on the quality of programmatic development you have a chance at achieving high commitment. Ahhh, once you get high commitment it is very likely you’ll get high performance.

This isn’t some mystical process. By deploying a leader in every locker approach your players are highly involved with an opportunity to become highly committed. Your challenge is to get them to willingly invest their minds and heart into the team leadership development process, building skills and competencies that lead to high performance. So, to wrap up this leadership bite here’s the formula once again: High Involvement + High Commitment = High Performance.

Encouragement: A gift to be given

Written and contributed by Dr. Chris Hobbs (Follow him on Twitter @Dr_ChrisHobbs)

Scott Drew is the head men’s basketball coach at Baylor University. Over the past 16 seasons, he’s won nearly 20 games per season. It’s an impressive stretch for a program that has a mediocre history and when Coach Drew arrived, was almost completely dead. If you want to read a story of persistence and comeback, read “The Leftovers” which is the story of massive scandal and homicide that rocked Baylor basketball. That is the program that Scott Drew took over. The author of the book, Matt Sayman, was one of only two players that remained in the program after the scandal and during Coach Drew’s arrival. The program was absolutely decimated with NCAA sanctions and terrible support from the local community. It was a very dark time in the life of Baylor basketball. Sayman says, ‘Coach Drew was always positive and always believed we could do the impossible.’ Those first Baylor teams under Coach Drew never actually accomplished the impossible in the win/loss column, but Coach Drew did something important. He provided the players on those teams the gift of encouragement that lasts to this day.

If you understand the intention of the word encouragement, maybe you’ll want to give the gift a little more as well.

Encouragement is to give strength or courage to another. It is the kind of expression that makes someone want to go on.

Here are a couple of ways a leader can give the gift of strength and courage to someone to the people in their care…

Call when things go wrong – Over the last year or so, I’ve really tried to embrace the mantra of ‘being the kind of leader that people want around when everything is going wrong.’ An important way to do this is make sure you are actually present when things are going wrong. Often, the best way to do this is to call and talk voice to voice to someone when their world is falling apart. Pick up the phone and show up for your people when things are not going well.

Confirm why things went well – Notice the wording of this suggestion. Expressing appreciation when things go well is nice. Expressing appreciation to someone for what they did (the why) to make things go well is next level encouragement. As a leader, it is important that you give people the freedom to make good things happen and then take the time to tell them what you observed as the ‘why’ behind those good things. A team member knows why things went well but to know that it was observed and confirmed by the leader is very encouraging.

Compliment by name and task – No matter what your opinion of the Bible might be there are some excellent accounts of incredible things that we can learn a lot from. One of those accounts is of Nehemiah who returned to Israel and returned it’s economic and military stability after the Babylonians had conquered it. Nehemiah rallied a diverse and unskilled group of laborers to accomplish the incredible engineering feat of rebuilding the walls around Jerusalem resurrected in only 52 days. The historical account includes an entire chapter of Nehemiah recognizing every group of laborers by their name and the task that they completed. This is simple and powerful encouragement that I have tried to implement anytime I address a group publicly. I compliment someone on my team by their name and by the task that they have performed well for our group.

There are a lot of different ways to give the gift of encouragement. I have only listed a few of the ways that this can be accomplished. I want to encourage you to be the type of person that gives the gift of encouragement to as many people as you can.

Keep on, keepin on, friend!

BLOG BIO

‘Bite Down and Don’t Let Go’ is a collection of writings on being intentional about life in a way that produces great persistence. Read about it more here.

Dr. Chris Hobbs is an educational leader and Director of Athletics at The King’s Academy in West Palm Beach, Florida. He’s earned a few degrees and won some awards. He’s happily married to his high school sweetheart and they have three teen age children. Life is messy and complicated most of the time. You can follow him on Twitter for all sorts of inspirational thoughts and good laughs.