Shortly after I arrived in South Korea in 2012, I was approached to coach the basketball team at the school where my wife was employed. I had little experience playing on a formal basketball team and even less coaching. Hackman and Walton suggested that there are three core components to effective teams which include a clear direction, and enabling situation, and adequate resource (as cited in Pennsylvania State University, 2015). Over the next three years, I learned firsthand the importance of these three components of team leadership and how they valuable they are in any leadership situation.
As a novice coach, I assumed every basketball team would have a clear direction with little necessary input from the coach: win games. What I failed to predict was that our team of all Korean players would be playing against teams with mostly foreign players. We traveled all around South Korea to international schools all of which had players at least six inches taller than our tallest player. It quickly became apparent that our team would not have an undefeated season anytime soon. Our team’s direction echoed my advice to the team at halftime of our first game. We could not control the size or skill of our opponents, but we could be the best players that we could be. We had to concentrate on improving our shooting percentage, our points per game, and our defensive effectiveness. These were our clear goals described by PSU (2015).
The reason the simple goal of winning all of our games was unfeasible was that we lacked a situation that enabled our team to achieve that goal. To be blunt, we were outmatched, so we had to change our goals. To give the players more experience playing against physically dominating opponents by having scrimmages against teachers. Of course the team needed to be structured in a way that facilitated progress towards our goals, so the right players had to be chosen for the proper positions. I also got together with the team during the offseason to play and have dinner together. This was an important way to build team cohesion which is a common offseason goal for coaches (Toros, Salman, & Sari, 2013).
The last hurdle faced by the team was a lack of adequate resources, namely time. While most of our opponents practice for two hours per day, we were limited to three hours per week of supervised training time. This was a limit imposed by the school itself so that other sports would have adequate training time. This lack of time made it essential for the team to come together and train without a coach. The team leadership dynamics emanated from this scenario, and the players were able to hold each other to high standards of excellence and commitment.
These experiences as a coach have given me valuable insight to team leadership and organizational leadership. Effective behavior of sports coaches can inform ones understanding of how organizational leaders should act (Northouse, 2013). Both should always be striving to improve the team and ensuring not only good present performance but bringing about future success as well. I will leave this school next month, but I am confident that the team will continue getting better as it has each year that I was here.
References
Toros, T., Salman, M., & Sari, I. (2013). The comparison of sports coache’s pre-season, in-season and post-season leadership behaviours in terms of sport psychology. International journal of human sciences, 10(1), 237-245. Retrieved from http://j-humansciences.com/ojs/index.php/IJHS/article/view/2499/pdf
Northouse, P.G. (2013). Leadership: Theory and Practice. Los Angeles: Sage Publications.
Pennsylvania State University [PSU]. (2015). Lesson 9: Team leadership. Psych485: Leadership in work settings. Retrieved from https://courses.worldcampus.psu.edu/sp15/psych485/002/content/09_lesson/07_page.html
Willie Vigil says
It was interesting to observe the use of goals in your development of the S Korean team. I fell that you could have maintained the goal of “winning games” but adjust your objectives, which are the stepping-stones to achieve that goal. I applaud your transformational leadership approach as you dedicated off-season time and demonstrated through dinners together and a true investment of yourself in this team. The standards of excellence that you have set ensure that team members know what is required to perform to standard. As well as seeking external support and recognition to obtain the required resources, equipment, and supplies to achieve your goal demonstrates that this example, is appropriate to this modules objectives.
REFRENCES
Northouse, P. (2013). Team Leadership. In Leadership: Theory and practice (6th ed., pp. 287-318). Thousand Oaks: SAGE.
Pennsylvania State World Campus (n.d.). Module 9 Team Leadership Retrieved from
https://courses.worldcampus.psu.edu/sp15/psych485/001/content/09_lesson/printlesson.html