Stakeholders and Buy-in: Managing to a Successful Season

As a youth coach, having an enriching and successful season takes more than just being an effective teacher. You must be able to create an environment where learning can take place and be reinforced. Part of creating this environment entails understanding your key stakeholders and managing their expectations. Your success in managing stakeholders’ expectations (especially those of the Parents) can make the difference between having a triumphantly rewarding season and a season where you keep asking, “Is it over yet?”

Stakeholders and Expectations
A stakeholder is anyone or anything that has a vested interest in your coaching, your team, or your season. Common stakeholders include your club.  Two of the most influential stakeholders are the Players and the Parents.

All stakeholders have expectations. Influential stakeholders have expectations that can shape the actions and perceptions of others. An expectation is a vision of a future state or an action to come. Expectations drive your stakeholders’ actions and decisions. They also tend to influence whether or not a stakeholder views you as effective and successful. The tricky part is that most expectations are unspoken. Therefore, if you want to be successful, stakeholders’ expectations need to be actively addressed. As business consultant David Alev writes, “Manage expectations or prepare to be managed.”

Most coaches, at some level, understand the importance of managing players’ expectations. If you have ever taken a CYSA Coaching License course, you’ve been exposed to a great tool for managing players’ expectations. Have you ever heard of the “9 step practice routine”? With the 9 step practice routine, players know what to expect when they come to practice. Practice isn’t just an hour and a half of drills ending with the coach asking, “Can anyone guess what we worked on today?” Players know that practice has a rhythm, flow, and destination. This in turn allows them to focus on the task at hand. In short, coaches know that managing players’ expectations is essential to creating a successful season. We are trained to ensure that players know what to expect and consistently work hard to make sure that there are no surprises. While coaches tend to proactively manage players’ expectations, we tend to forget about the other key stakeholder group: The Parents.

Key Stakeholder – Parents
Parents, as a group, can be the most influential stakeholders. On and off the field, parents affect the soccer learning environment. Parents can shape how a player perceives everything from his / her abilities, to the quality of practices, to whether the team was successful during a game (regardless of whether the team won or not). Remember, parents have access to the players far more than coaches do. For better or worse, intentionally or unintentionally, a parent’s expectations will probably affect the player’s learning and enjoyment.

I know this to be true because it recently happened to my daughter. Yes, I was the unhappy parent. My daughter joined a U-14 competitive team. At first she truly enjoyed practices. Her team was allowed to frolic and laugh and fall on the ground and chat almost at will. Needless to say, as a parent paying more than a thousand of dollars for my daughter to play competitive ball, I expected a bit more structure at practices. However, my daughter seemed to enjoy being part of the team, so I did my best to keep my “not so rosy” opinion to myself. As the season went on and this behavior continued, I became more and more disgruntled. My daughter’s technique, physical conditioning and tactical awareness diminished rather than improved as the season continued.  Off the field, I began to express my perspective on the practices and the coach in “less than glowing” terms to my wife. At first, I made sure my daughter was not around, but as the season went on, I became less and less guarded with my comments. After one of my comments, I heard my daughter say, “The only thing we did at practice was mess around.” This was the first time that she had said something negative about her team. It struck me as odd. Within weeks, my daughter asked if she could quit the team. When I asked her the reason for this, I heard my own word (almost verbatim) parroted back at me.  I would like to think that it was my daughter’s sophisticated soccer insight that caused her to form this opinion, but something tells me that I had something to do with it. This is a long way of saying, if the parents aren’t happy, the players aren’t (or won’t be) happy. Therefore, managing parents’ expectations is one of the keys to a successful season, but how do we do this?

Working with Expectations
By looking outside of soccer to the business community for tips, we can create an effective approach for managing parents’ expectations. According to the various sources in the business consulting world, the keys to managing expectations consists of creating a common vision and constant communication. Creating a common vision entails the following: 1) determine your vision, 2) develop a plan to reach this future state, and 3) communicate the vision and the plan to ensure a common understanding and buy-in. Constant two-way communication is embedded throughout the process of creating a shared vision. Let’s see how a coach can use this information to help him work with parents.

Determining a goal is the first step to managing perception. As a coach, you need to know what you would like to achieve in order for others to be able to share and support the vision. Your image should take into account factors like the team’s age group, the experience level of the players, and needs of the players. Sharing your initial thoughts with others is important. It helps to ensure that your dream is realistic and relevant. In most cases, your goal will be something that most parents will like and approve. An appropriate future state for a U-6 team may be to ensure the players have safe fun with the ball. On the other hand, an appropriate vision for a U-10 team may be to improve the fundamental skills of the each player.

Now that you have a destination in mind for your team, you need a road map. Develop a plan to get your team to where you envision them. This plan entails defining smaller more attainable goals. An example of a smaller more attainable goal may be to increase the number of times a player can juggle the ball by ten percent in two weeks. In this plan, you need to define the roles of those involved and how these groups will interact. In most cases, the key participants are: the coaching “staff” (many times just you), the players, and the parents. Unless your plan includes all of these groups working together to reach a common vision, you are in for a very long season. Defining the roles for each group may seem obvious. Players play, coaches teach, and parents support. However, unless you define what this looks like, some parents’ version of support may include the phrase, “Johnny, if you don’t score, you don’t get dinner!!” (I heard this from a parent at a U-12 recreational game). An example of defining how groups interact may be informing the parents that if they have a concern they should approach you either before or after practices or games.

Now you have a vision and a plan. It’s time to engage the parents to create a common vision. This can be done with a combination of informal channels (impromptu one on one conversations) reinforcing more formalized means (meetings and handouts).  Regardless of the method, there are a few things that will facilitate embracing a common vision. First, communicate your vision, your plan, and the ramifications of the plan as completely as you can. The intent is to eliminate as many surprises as possible. For example, your main goal of developing each player’s fundamentals could lead to many losses. At less skilled levels of the game, putting your fastest player up front and “booting” the ball to her may lead to goals and winning. However, this does little to develop the players. Encouraging all players to have access to the ball in game situations will help develop the players, but may not lead to winning games. While most parents can get behind “developing all of the players”, many may not realize that this could result in losing games. In this instance, the coach needs to be very clear that, to make his vision a reality, the players’ development takes priority over winning.

Second, and just as important, make sure to actively listen to the parents’ feedback, comments, and concerns. If they have feedback, comments, or suggestions, incorporate them into your vision or plan whenever possible. If you feel that the suggestion doesn’t contribute obtaining the goal, work with the parent to reach a common understanding. If any of the parents express a concern, make sure to address the concern directly, and then ask the parent if you have addressed the concern completely. This should be a two way conversation. Engage your parents in a dialog. Only by listening to your parents will you know if they share your vision.

Finally, now that you have communicated your vision and plan, and you have engaged the parents in a meaningful dialog, it’s time to gain their “buy-in”. Have the parents invest a bit of themselves into the vision. This can be done by giving them a specific part of the plan to own. For example, let the parents know that a common error that players make is calling for the ball while standing behind a defender. Inform them that in the following weeks your team will be working on showing between defenders to support the player with the ball. Over the course of the next few games, ask them to pay particular attention to moments when their child shows between defenders to support. Have them praise their player for stepping out from behind a defender. Giving the parents this piece of the plan serves several functions. First, it educates the parents. Now everyone can agree that success is having the player show between defenders. Both you and the parent have a common vision and expectation. Second, because the parent is actively investing themselves in the plan, he / she will tend be more supportive of the plan. Finally, assuming the parent is keying on the correct moments, the player is praised for properly supporting from both the parent and the coach. As a result, all three actors, player, coach and parent, will share a common vision of success.

0 and 12 – One of My Best Seasons
Managing parents’ expectations truly helps. One of my most successful seasons ended with a record of 0 and 12. After my first practice, it was very obvious that almost all of my players had “less than refined” skills. I decided to focus on developing the basic skills of each of my players. My mistake was that I kept this goal to myself. I was THE coach. I decided what was best for MY players and MY team. Our first game, we were handed an 8 to 0 beating. Needless to say, neither the parents nor the players were very happy. Oddly enough, one of my players did not return. Nonetheless, I stayed with MY plan. I knew that it would help MY players in the long run. Our second game ended with a 6 to 0 loss, and I lost 2 more players the following week. Even though my vision and plan was sound, it became excruciatingly obvious that my approach was not working. I communicated my goal and plan to both the players and the parents. After several rounds of talks, we all agreed that individual improvement was more important than the score. The improvement came. The players started to have more fun, and the parents started to smile. We lost every game that season. However, every player was proud of what they accomplished. The parents commented on how much the players improved. Once I started managing expectations, the season became a great success.

Summary
Many people have a vested interest in the success or failure of your team. Parents are among the most influential of these stakeholders. Their actions are largely driven by their expectations. One of the keys to a successful season is managing the parents’ expectations. An effective approach to managing their expectations includes: 1) defining your vision, 2) developing a plan to reach this future state, and 3) communicating this image and the plan to ensure a common understanding and buy-in. Additionally, the more that you engage the parents in two way communication, the greater the likelihood that you and the parents have matching expectations. By managing the parents’ expectations, even a 0 and 12 season can be hailed by all as a great success.

References:

Alev, David, “Manage Expectations or Expect to be Managed,” http://consultingacademy.com/a08.shtm

BNET Editorial, “Managing Expectations,” http://www.bnet.com/2410-13069_23-95591.html

Daly, P.G., “Managing Project Expectations,” http://www.intranetjournal.com/articles/200505/pij_05_11_05a.html , May 11, 2005

Dewazien, Karl, Practice of Champions, FUN Soccer Enterprises, Fresno, CA. 2002