Author Peter J. Schroeder (2008) assesses how ten (10) NCAA Division I coaches guided previously unsuccessful teams to championship levels within five (5) years in, “Changing Team Culture: The Perspectives of Ten Successful Head Coaches.”
Schroeder states, A qualitative analysis indicated that these turnarounds featured changes in team culture (p. 63).
The following leadership behaviors used by coaches were found to maximize a team’s ability to achieve success.
- an integrative, leader-centered model focused on forming symbolic and interpretive elements of team membership;
-developing a team culture based on the social and psychological environment;
-developing a pattern of shared assumptions that guides behavior; -adapting organizational values and symbols to promote team
values in concert with a team environment;
-reframing the meaning of team membership to create organizational and team culture changes.
Using these practical ideas for effective coaching, how a coach can maximize the team’s ability to achieve success?
A synthesis of dynamics that encourage team improvement, essential elements can be refined to include a coach’s:
a) leadership behaviors: such as developing a core set of values,
b) establishing team culture: social and psychological environment, and
c) team improvement: symbolic and interpretive elements of
team membership (Schroeder, 2008, pp. 65-67).
Simplification and synthesis of topics is ideal to create more effective lists: Successful coaching includes numerous overarching themes
of behavioral, cultural, social, psychological, and philosophical change.
Cultural perspectives have more elusive fundamental explanations. Complex content may also be accomplished through mediums such as transcripts, memos, matrices, category and sub-category diagrams, tables, charts, ‘brain-storms’, interviews, anecdotes, or a series of questions that guide team culture change, and by representing symbolic and interpretive elements that lead to successful coaching
-Schroeder, 2008, p. 70
The primary method of Schroeder’s (2008) paper on successful coaching relies on semi-structured interviews to include a wide range of topics where responses are allowed to shape questions and then result in more focused discussion.
Coaching perspectives in each case found that coaches were:
1) attuned to the concept of team culture which they attempted to modify,
2) coaches spent time developing and using a variety of tactics to facilitate change, and;
3) cultural change seemed to be accelerated by the unique environment of intercollegiate athletics (Schroeder, 2008, p. 84).
The insights that successful coaching stems from creating a team culture, that time and tactics are required to accomplish change, and the variations for differences among youth, v. high-school, v. college levels, each define and generate possibilities about, which coaching tactics are successful, could be examined further.
