Floorball – Do we use the same system?

Misunderstandings create conflicts

A consequence of bad listening is conflicts. Did you know that over 90% of all conflicts starts from a misunderstanding, we did not listen to the sender careful enough, or the opposite, and we did not secure that we had the same picture with some questions, have I understood you correctly if I interpret what you said like this… We can still have different opinions about the issue, but at least we know that.

Do we use the same system

Think of 1-2-2 set up in floorball, how would you describe it? Depending on your age, geographical location, values, competence, experience and so on you will describe it in a certain way. Do you think you and I would have the same picture? What if you were on a seminar with 100 floorball coaches, you probably could find someone with same thinking, but otherwise you would get many different views of 1-2-2, everything from extremely defensive set up to extremely offensive and everything in between. So if you would attend at seminar like this, and got the opportunity to talk about 1-2-2 with everyone, you would need to be really present in your listening and check with questions that you have understood correctly. What great learning experience or source for conflicts (same topic, but different pictures = misunderstanding = conflict)

Floorball defense

Think of following situation. You have been signed to lead a football team and explain for the team that you want to use the 2-2-1 set up, and immediately get the response, “good we know that system, it’s the same as our previous coach used”.  This could be a major pitfall, if you think you and your players and the previous floorball coach had the same picture of how to play 2-2-1. Instead you could start asking questions to understand how they did play in general, offensive, defensive, you might find similarities to your thinking, but you would also find differences in both why, what and how.

See you or send me an e-mail?

Another part that will affect our communication is, how you perceive things around you. By seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting or smelling?How do you perceive things? If you don’t have the answer, you can think of, how you say good bye, or end up a phone call, or you are maybe only sending text messages (sms and e-mail). I myself usually end up with “bye, see you” (even if it’s a phone call or I know that the next meeting will be a phone call as well). I want to see and hear things. So why am I writing about this, because it’s a very important part in communication and reaching your players with your message. I usually talk in pictures, I try to create an image of my message at least in my leadership role, risking therefore to lose some of my audience, who don’t primarily perceive things visually, therefore it’s important to try to mix your message (See – hear – feel – taste – smell) if it’s a large team/group you are talking to or try to adjust your message to the individual receiver, to be able to do that you need of course to know your floorball players well.

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 – Teamwork – Playing together

This part is about predicting a floorball teams performance and possibility to deliver results. The Teamwork part consist of three blocks, capacity + team spirit – co-operational losses = team performance.

In capacity you can put in:
Practice facilities
The amount of football practices
Practice length
How you use the practice time (quality of the practice)
Training equipment
Competence
Experience
Support round the team (ass. Coaches, goalie trainers, material management, doctors)

Strengthen resources and skills

Build up your resources and the individual skills of your players. A team with individual competent players will obviously have better opportunities compared with less skilled teams. In the team capacity you include physics, condition, fitness, speed, strength, body size, attitude, motivation, mental or psychological skills and coordination skills. Other categories are age, experience, education, gender and social status.
Support round the team like assistant coaches, goalkeeping coaches, fitness trainers, physics, masseurs, doctors, sports scientist, sport psychologist etc.

Manchester United for example has, a full time doctor, five physios, a fitness coach, a weights coach, an optometrist…

“Captains and coaches from all over the world considered that Mourinho got the best results with less resources than their rivals, but he has been rude and with no education in his behaviour to achieve his objectives.” /Franz Beckenbauer

Floorball victory through best youth practices and drills

Team-spirit can be described in many ways, here some keywords:
How well we know each other
Striving together towards a common goal
Honesty
Loyalty
Positivity
Humility
Showing that you are ready to do things for others (acting)
Solving problems together
Good communication
Supporting each other
Ethics
Moral
1+1=3

Co-operational losses can be described as the opposite to team-spirit, but also as more practical losses during a practice or a game:
Lack of…
How you use the practice time (quality of the practice)
Equipment
Competence
Experience
Support round the team (ass. Coaches, goalie trainers)
Common goals
Honesty
Loyalty
Positivity
Humility
Solving problems together
Communication
Supporting each other
Ethics
Moral
Norms

Floorball practices and drills 2 on 1

Co-operational losses can also be:
Undefined roles
Bad passes
Wrong positioning
Bad performance/errors during the drills on your practice
Unclear directives
We and them thinking or me and you (in a negative way)
Egoistic behavior (in a negative way)

Smooth co-operation

Get the different groups in your team to work together smoothly, through for example the team set up (like e.g. 2-2-1) and with synchronizing defense and forwards. The composal of the floorball team is important in avoiding co-operational losses. To practice with the same speed and intensity as in a floorball game is obvious for every coach. In avoiding the social loafing part, you need to have clear roles, responsibilities and norms in your floorball team.

Ringelmann study – Tug of war

One of the earliest studies in the area of co-operational losses and social loafing was done by Ringelmann. Ringelmann let people participate in a “tug of war”. He started to measure their individual capacity, which was defined as 100%. Then they did the exercise in pairs, with three people, four people and so on. The result showed that in pairs they reached 93% of their capacity, three people reached 85% of their individual capacity, 77% in a team of four and only 49% in a team of eight people.

The tendency that peoples effort decreases in a larger group is sometimes called the “Ringelmann effect”, he’s study is supported with more recent studies (Ingham, Levinger, Graves & Peckham, 1974) This could explain why some star players sometimes are invisible during a game, they are waiting for the other players to perform and not counting their own low performance will be visible. It can also be the opposite, many of the team members take a step back and wait for the star player to win the game for the team. This type of social loafing will appear on all levels, in all ages and regardless of gender.

Social loafing as a result from a red card?

Social loafing can also be visible after a red card in a football game, the team with all players left feel they have an advantage and instead of continuing, they take a step back and feel comfortable, social loafing and the team with only ten players might feel they need to take greater responsibility and therefore the game might continue look like they play with even strength.

With this prerequisites you should try to improve you capacity and team spirit and to reduce the co-operational losses.

Easiest part to copy between floorball teams

The easiest part to improve or at least get the right prerequisites from the beginning in big European football teams is probably the capacity block, and now I’m talking about really big teams like Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Inter, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich etc. You can buy the players “you want”, you have everything in place round the team, and this is the part that’s also easiest to “copy” between the teams.

But unlimited money will not grant you success, there are many failures back in time with clubs getting a lot of money and unlimited resources to buy players, but the victories aren’t still coming and then you have problems with other parts in this football leadership model, like team-spirit, co-operational losses, motivation or common goals…

I don’t think José Mourinho had the best team regarding capacity in Inter 2010, of course he had world-class players, but not the best indivual players, some other teams had stronger names on the paper (e.g. Barcelona), but he mastered the other parts in leading the team in a briljant way. He was able to motivate the players, build up a strong team-spirit and reduce the co-operational losses and the result was there, three titles!

“It is like having a blanket that is too small for the bed. You pull the blanket up to keep your chest warm and your feet stick out. I cannot buy a bigger blanket becuase the supermarket is closed. But I am content because the blanket is cashmere. It is no ordinary blanket.”

“We are on top at the moment but not because of the club’s financial power. We are in contention for a lot of trophies because of my hard work.”  José Mourinho

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