Floorball – Taking care of the results

Usually you only see the hard results, your score in the football game, your position in the league and so on. Many times you forget to see the progress and results in the “soft” parts, like working together (teamwork), better communication, team spirit etc. The majority of coaches are judged purely on results and in many cases, purely on immediate success rather on their performance level connected to the pre-requisites.

Working together as a floorball team

Even if it’s the hard results that will count in floorball, but the soft results will make the right prerequisites for the hard results!

Floorball – Sorry I can’t hear you, my ego is calling for attention

Tune in the communication frequency

When you talk about communication you often talk about sender and receiver, and if it would be only a question of these two roles, communication would be easy. But communication takes time and has more aspects to consider, you have competence, experience, expectations and the environment that can affect your communication. If you have a great competence and experience in some subject it will probably affect the way you express yourself and depending on the receiver’s competence and experience your message will be interpreted in different ways. The receiver will also be affected of his/her expectations on your message and could sometimes also “shut off” in certain situations, because he/she “knows” what’s coming.

game3

The environment will of course affect your message, during a game there could be noise from the crowd/parents that will disturb the communication.

Are you with me, does it make sense, yes…

When you are talking look at your players are they listening, are they “here”. Are they looking at you, nodding or shaking their heads?

It can be hard to check if your players have understood your message if you do it like most of us do, by asking, have you understand? And the answer will be, yes!

What if you just asked someone of the players to summarize shortly what you have said, so everyone has the same picture of the message and you would get a receipt of understanding.

Youth Floorball tactics and feedback

This same rule goes for you as a leader receiving a question from your players, summarize what you have heard and answer after that, so you know you answer to the question he/she actually wants the answer to, not what you expect or guess he/she asks about.

Sorry I can’t hear you, my ego want’s some attention

To be able to understand someone else you need to understand the other parts point of view, and this can be hard if you self are having a different view or are eager to express your “brilliant” idea / comment / question etc, but there is a good rule, you need to let go of your own perspective in order to be able to understand someone else. In practice this means you can not think of your own picture when you are trying to understand the picture the other one is painting, this goes for all of us.

 

“Many people have so big egos screaming so loudly, that they aren’t able to hear what others are saying”

Floorball – Conflict Handling

First things first, calm down. An old referee used to tell anyone who would listen to him this one thing, once a floorball coach begins to yell, the discussion is over. Take his advice, speak slowly and speak softly. When conflict occurs, your best bet is to remain calm, remain logical, and speak your piece. Listen to what the other party is saying and take it seriously, and most of all, understand that you will not win most of the time, and it should not be the main purpose.

Working together as a floorball team

So, conflict happens, so now what?  Well, smart floorball coaches understand that in conflict, there is opportunity. During a conflict, the way you act will determine the ground rules for the next dispute. For instance, if during a floorball practice the head coach yells back at a frustrated player, there is a good chance that this player will shut down and stop dealing with this coach. On the other hand, if the coach remains calm, speaks his mind, and deals honestly with the floorball player, the coach will open lines for future communication.

So remember to calm down, conflict isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In conflict, there is an opportunity to exchange points of view. Conflict can be viewed as a chance to learn another point of view.  And besides all that, no one wins them all.

Floorball – Guided discovery

Magnifying glass.
Most of us has once owned a magnifying glass, have you? I have. The original purpose of a magnifying glass is to visualize the details or make the details bigger. Did you use the magnifying glass for something else? I did…
I assume that you have at least once tried to create a fire with your magnifying glass, when you were young? How can this be connected to (direction) your vision, goals and focused areas?
Your vision goals and focused areas should do the exact same work as the magnifying glass, catch the energy within the frames and focus it to a point to create fire.

Youth Floorball shooting, goal scoring practices and drills

Are we looking at the same picture?

One of the most important things, when talking about vision, goals and focused areas is communication. How can you secure that everyone has the same target image or picture as you want or how do you know the player have understood your message or seen the picture you try to “paint” out for them?

There will be a lot of things that will make the picture to differ between your floorball players, experience, expectations, their own will, the language you are using including your body language and many other things. Therefore it’s important that you somehow get a receipt of their understanding and interpretations. If you also allow you players to comment or maybe add things to your vision, focus or goals, you will immediately get a stronger buy in from each and one of the players.

A message from the future

Why should you have a vision? The vision will give you guidance in your leadership, coaching, daily decision making, acting and communication.

When you talk about a vision, you and I might have different pictures in our heads. I will try to give you my picture. For me to start with a vision can be in whatever format, only your own fantasy can limit it. It can be everything between some bullet points on a paper to a short movie “from the future”. So the format is not that important, but how it’s perceived, it should create energy and direct it on the long term, and to be honest how exciting are some bullet points, even if they would do the work?

A vision can be a colorful multi-dimensional description of what you as the leader see in the future, you can in your own mind/head try to move couple of years into the future and describe what you see, feel, hear, regarding the team, achievements, team spirit, players, club, fans, results, behavior etc. A good way to describe what has happened in the future is to actually try to describe it as it would have happened, not in, should terms. Because as you have read earlier the pictures you create are important (sour lemon or basketball example). There is one more dimension to ad, our brains can not make difference between created realistic pictures and realistic pictures, the difference comes from our own values and belief…

I try to visualize the difference for you.

Vision 2014
– We should win the league 2014
– We should improve our team-spirit
– We should increase the intensity in our practices
– We must… etc.

Or…

8th of May 2014
I would like to welcome you all to this press conference. I can imagine you have a lot of questions after our victory in the League. If I just start to give you my point of view of the key success factors, after that you will be able to ask some questions to the players.

To start with, I think our victory would have not been possible without the fantastic team spirit we have in our team, everyone has a clear defined role, and all of the players have accepted this during this year/these years, we don’t use the word “first teamers”, we are one TEAM.

During this year we have increased the intensity in our practices which we also showed clearly in yesterday’s last game in the league. We were the strongest team in the end, we were willing to run the extra mile, and if you look at the amount of goals we have scored this season, it’s 89 goals and that gives you also the picture of an offensive, strong and quick team!

The setup, could be that you actually rig a press conference with the players in the press role. Do you feel the difference between these examples?

Guided discovery and all in

After creating a vision it’s important to also involve your floorball players, what do they think? Is this the correct way? Don’t just accept an yes, ask questions, why do they think it’s the right way, or why not, what did they find exciting in the vision (and not, why?), was there something that needs to be changed, added or deleted? In the end you are of course the one deciding about changes, but if you don’t listen to your players, you need to explain why you will do that, why you will continue with your “picture”, but in that case are you walking alone towards the vision or do you have your team with you on the trip? I can say that if the vision is well taught throug, prepared and tested on a smaller group before the presentation, and it’s attractive, you will only get positive feedback and explanations why it’s correct and therefore the players also feel that the vision is also theirs. Otherwise you sometimes get good input that will complement the vision, things that you haven’t thought about or didn’t feel were important, but for the team it was. Even if you make some changes, you will still have the same buy in from your team, in this case maybe even more, because they have added something and you as the leader have showed them that their opinion counts, respect!

José Mourinho

The same method applied on practices and drills.
“I use a global method, I use direct methods when preparing our organization, but I also use guided discovery where I create the practice, dictate the aim, and the players come up with different solutions” /José Mourinho

Floorball Communication Guidelines

One good communication guideline I can give you, is that, always remember who or what you are speaking to, or about, and pay attention to the situation that you are in. You cannot use the same logic and vocabulary with a group of eight year old floorball players that you would with a team of professional floorball players. You might be able to yell at older players during floorball drills, but you can’t do the same thing to a ten year old floorball player or with a referee during a game.

Floorball game and passing drill practices

Above all, always, remember that the world does not circle around you, each floorball game and practice is just a practice, until you start to earn your living on it, then the stakes might be higher.
Every floorball player, parent, spectator, and game official has their own beliefs and sets of priorities. Very few of these people will bend to your desires just because you are a floorball coach. Be prepared to explain what you want and why, this will help you on you floorball coach journey.