Parents Like to Complain…..

No words can describe the fear an angry parent can make someone feel. Parents pick out any and all things that have gone wrong in their child’s day, especially Little League. Last year, Kent Little League went through a major overhaul of new board members. With new members, means new changes. Parents raised concerns about everything, from the rain, which no one had control over, to the communication in the league. As a coach and a board member, I had front row seats to all the complaints. I knew the only thing I could do at that point was listen, write down notes, and promise to use these complaints as fuel to make the next season better.

Spring Season is right around the corner, and I have done everything I could to help the communication be better than ever. Glenn Llopis writes in Forbes, “The reality is that without strategy, change is merely substitution – not evolution.” (Llopis, 2014) After the last game, board meetings started to die down and new board members were to be elected in September 2017. This meant for the majority, we had an idea of how we wanted to make the league better and more positive. You may be wondering how we were going to do this? Let me explain…

I had a conversation with the President of the league and let him know what the concerns were from the previous season and how

I planned to help eliminate some of the complaints. I had a strategy. I knew I had to be one of the leaders on the board at this point. As a Board, we were missing follow through. Everyone had all of these bright ideas, but strategizing and coming together to figure out how to change our ways for the greater good of the league was nearly impossible. I knew this had to change. I already realized how important reactive change was, and I started to implement it within our board. “Cultural changes cannot happen without leadership, and efforts to change culture are the crucible in which leadership is developed.” (Quinn, 2016) Our league was going down the hole. People were forgetting why were were out there volunteering our time in the first place. Knowing the mindset of the current leadership on the league, I had to help make the league a positive place; somewhere more parents wanted to volunteer, and a place where more kids wanted to come out and enjoy the sport.

Going back to the number one concern from parents was communication; we started with a league facelift. We took our old website and created a new look, and user friendly command center where parents can find all the information they need for their Child’s season of baseball. The response from some of the board members was that the old was great, why did we need new… They had issues with change themselves, but soon they would get over their inner challenges, and realize they weren’t doing anything to improve the bigger picture.

During the course of the winter months, the new website became a finished product, and strategies on how to help communication began to be talked about in the board meetings. Change initiatives were developing, and people were beginning to get excited about the season that was fast approaching. Ryan and Robert Quinn explain in a Harvard Business Review article called, Change Management and Leadership Development Have to Mesh, “The bottom-up part of the integrated development and change process requires potential leaders throughout the organization to engage in a process of learning how to enact a desired change in organization’s culture in the everyday experiences of organizational life.” In other words, I believe this is true even in a little league situation like, communication within the league. The league has become a happier, more organized environment where people want to be leaders and help each other make the league better than years before. It takes a team to make an organization profitable, even when it comes to parent complaints. You don’t realize how much they hurt an organization until profits dwindle and numbers drop.

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