Coaching the U.S. Men's Soccer Coach Starts Here! (Part 3)
Team Collaboration in Business

Coaching the U.S. Men's Soccer Coach Starts Here! (Part 3)

(A Team Leadership Fable)

Wrapping up week three now with coaching the coach.  We’re on a mission to build his self-awareness.  The endgame is to achieve high leader EQ (emotional intelligence), enabling him to fully function as the team’s coach.  Keep in mind, he came to this opportunity with high soccer IQ and low leader EQ.

For our coach, building self-awareness starts by understanding how his underlying assumptions, values and personality affect his behavior – and eventually the team’s performance.  Here, I’m reminded of the ‘iceberg’ graphic introduced by colleague, Bruce Griffiths,[1] many years ago. He uses it to help people understand the visible and hidden parts of a competency.  I’ve used it numerous times in my leadership and coaching work.  Underlying assumptions, values, and personality lie below the surface of the water, all hidden components.  Behavior sits above the surface, visible for all of us to see.

Note, the three components below the surface are all part of our coach’s newly established performance baseline.  This (i.e., graphic - not shown) provides a visual representation to help him connect the dots and get comfortable with ‘internal’ relationships he needs to understand and manage.  It should also help gain his added buy-in to the process we’ve started.  Make sense?

After meeting with our coach today, we have established that: (1) he has Theory Y, positive assumptions about people; (2) he has a Myers-Briggs personality profile described as ISTJ; and, (3) he has six competencies listed as needs improvement; Adaptability, Communicativeness, Delegation, Influence, Relationship Building, and Risk Taking (all possible blind spots).

At this point in coaching the coach, I feel good about his responsiveness to the coaching and eagerness to learn.  His self-awareness is starting to grow!  Moving forward, there are a couple of items for us to review to continue building self-awareness. The first deals with the competency, Influence, that he identified as needing improvement – mentioned in Part - 2 (9/4/24).  Here, he needs to understand that flexibility in his leadership style is needed to effectively influence players on the team.  The idea that a single style such as ‘directing’ can be applied in all situations is not effective.  This will require him to learn and develop a new skill to execute leadership flexibility.  Time permitting, there is a program he can attend.  Otherwise, I can step out of my coaching role and teach him since I’m a certified facilitator in the program.

Okay, that leaves us with gaining his understanding of why Relationship Building (a competency needing improvement) is so important to his success and like Influence, critical to achieving high leader EQ!  This gets us back to Daniel Goleman’s EQ Model,[2] introduced in Part – 1 (8/29/24), where both competencies show up under the ‘Relationship Management’ domain.  Competence in this domain enables him to achieve high leader EQ.  Perhaps the ultimate challenge in Goleman’s model, getting there is a derivative of doing many things right.  As someone described as a quiet Introvert, he will need to find ways to move beyond his comfort zone to extend himself to others.  More on that later.  

Because of the limited amount of time left for our coach to get his team in World Cup competitive form, placing an emphasis on Relationship Building will be demanding.  Yet, he and the team will be at risk if he can’t find ways to leverage relationships (and relationship building) to win over players.   This may be his greatest leadership challenge as the team’s new coach.  At the end of the day, I’m reminded of Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso who was able to leverage relationship building to win over players, the press, and the fans to succeed. I’m also reminded of the late, great leadership scholar, Warren Bennis, who back in the day, said that “leadership is about relationships (and relationship building).  And, if he had to give everything up except for one thing, it would not be relationships (and relationship building).”


[1] Bruce Griffiths is President, Organizational Systems International (www.orgsysint.com) in San Diego, CA.

[2] See, Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence (2002).

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