Tag Archives: Goals

Floorball – Hard days will always come, but never last?

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What other people think of you is none of your business (I think Mourinho could have said that), Leadership is about having an unshakeable faith in your goals, vision and in your power to make positive things to happen together with your floorball team, these are also the things, good leaders are able to feed back to the team, to give more energy and keep a clear direction.
Just remember that hard days will always come, but never last, but strong people always do. Hard times are just opportunities to learn for the future!
Hard times build great leaders and floorball players. During the hard times and pressure, your leadership ability and skills are tested. Are you, or can you always be in control of things?

Floorball deke ball control

“If everything is under control, you are going too slow” /Mario Andretti, race driver

“The only thing that we cannot control is our supporters” / José Mourinho

“Pain is temporary. Quitting last forever”. /Lance Armstrong

Great leaders and teams create castles of the stones others throw at them, but it’s impossible to build a castle of success on a foundation of excuses.

Floorball Team dynamics on practices and games

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So far, I have been talking about Steiner’s model in the teamwork part, but of course there are other models that can help you understand your floorball team behavior and development. Below you find a summary of Tuckman & Jensen 1977, team development model.

Floorball game situation drills and practices

Forming – The floorball team members get to know each other and start to identify the task/challenge they are facing and how they should solve it. This is a very exciting phase for each member, although they might have spent one or more seasons together, but when you add or trade/add/remove players or change the task for the team, you will start from the beginning by forming.

Storming – Now the “honeymoon” is over and you will probably or most likely face conflicts and tensions in your floorball team, between the players and sometimes between you and a player (or this will be hidden under the surface). The conflicts can be about roles in the team, behavior, tactics etc. If the conflicts are not handled some teams will not take the next step and be stuck in storming phase.

Norming – The floorball players start to find their places and roles within the team. Roles and norms start to be established and clear for everyone, regarding both the task and social intercourse. Goals are getting clearer and clearer and the co-operation is strengthened within the team.

Performing – Now the floorball team is ready, relations, roles, goals and norms are clear for everyone and accepted. The focus is now the first steps towards the common goal on short and long term, by beating other teams.

Adjourning – The season is over and the motivation is lower than before and the relationship between the floorball players might not be that important anymore, the focus starts to shift to holidays and next season.

Norway Structured Development and Clear Vision

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The most impressive presentation during the coach training, was the Norwegian one. So good content and fantastic presentation by Roy Johansen (National team coach) and his colleague from Olympic coaching team.

Roy Johansen Norway Hockey
Roy Johansen to the left

Norway started their development by thinking of, what are the best teams / nations doing? What does the best hockey (floorball) player do, what skills do they have, and what skills are they masters of?

Then they continued with working with their own team identity, who are we? What can we be best in? What can we control? Can we chase the other team all over the rink?

As an output from this, Team Norway could get some answers and identify areas to focus on. The key area was the answer to the questions, What can we be best in? What can we control? We can be physically prepared.
Therefore they
– Created a physical training development stair, with defined levels of, what is world class.
– Started an “Ironman” competition for all players and teams, that is run before the season starts.
– Defined their way of playing hockey (floorball)
– Defined team values, or valuing words to describe wanted behavior within the team.
– Set goals short and long term

Team Norway Hockey, Victory over Latvia during World Championships 2012

“Extreme goals – Requires extreme process”
/Team Norway

To be continued…

Floorball – Specific goals create energy and persistence over time

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What’s measured gets done, clear goals will also increase the effort to reach the goals within the floorball team. Your goals will also guide you as floorball coach in planning and prioritizing your activities for the team and of course the roadmap will be clearer when you know where you are heading.

Floorball goal scoring, shooting practices and drills

Specific goals

Try to specify your goals as much as possible, because this will increase the effort and clarity of the goal. It will also be easier for you as the coach to evaluate the effort and give feedback if the goal is more specific. If you want to increase the ball possession, you could set a target to have at least ten successful passes from each player during a game, instead of saying, we need to increase the ball possession (or the worst case we should avoid losing ball).

Floorball skill practice drills

Use the goal setting for both floorball practices and games and try to write down the goals and visualize it for the team. This will secure that you have the same view of what’s measured and what’s needed to be done. If you are only discussing the goals, it will be possible that you don’t have the same picture or you or your players forget the goal and it can be interpreted in different directions by each player when the time goes by.

Common mistakes in goal setting

The goals are not…
– Followed up
– Visualized
– Specific
– Understood
– Few (too many goals will split up the energy and focus)

If your goals and vision is strong enough it will create energy and persistence over time.

“We shall have a man on the moon before the end of the decade”

Floorball – Wanted position

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I will talk about two ways of setting goals, or how to look at the goal setting process. The first one is about looking back on your performance and setting the goal little bit higher than the history shows.

If you are thinking about goal for the league position, you might look at your previous seasons 10 pos. 8 pos. 9 pos. and therefore you think a realistic goal should be 6 or 7 position, but you might to choose to raise it a little bit to position 5.

The second way to set goals is to take a step into the future and to think where you would want to be in the future or were you must be in order to achieve something. Let’s say your floorball team is in the next highest division. Maybe you have described in your vision that you want to be in the premier league (highest division), therefore you automatically must be top 2 or 3 in your division in order to be able to take the next step. This could create a conflict, if you have team members that are “stuck” in the history, they won’t think this is a realistic goal, and it might not be, it’s your wanted position in order to take the next step.

Floorball thanks for the game

If you are setting goals by taking a step into the future and pointing out a wanted position, you will create an information gap that needs to be explained for your floorball players. So the discussion should rather be about, if they want to be there, than if it’s realistic. After you have cleared out that, you can start to take small steps back from the future, if we want to be here, top 2 and advance a division. What changes do we need to do in order to achieve that? You need to slice the big block to small steps (We need to increase the amount of practices. We need to think about what and how we eat. We need to improve our defense.) When you have this discussion about many small improvements with your floorball players, you get a buy in on the goal and suddenly it starts to be realistic at least in every ones heads.

You can think about José Mourinhos challenge when setting a goal, that was to win the Champions League, when Inter had won it, last time in 1965, maybe it was more realistic if you look at other aspects than the historical performance, like the team members and Mourinho himself.

In short term goal setting you can use the same methodology, in order to support your long term goal and vision.

Floorball practice shooting drill

The last level defining a focus area will support you in achieving your short term goal (and long term goal and vision). What do we need to focus on as the first steps on our way towards our wanted position? This should of course be transferred to concrete actions and an action plan.

As a summary you can say that you can work with setting the direction on different levels, Vision – Long term goals – Short term goals – Focused areas – Actions/Action plan.