Monthly Archives: August 2017

A coach must recognize his own leadership style and practice it wisely. In my last post about leadership, I reflected on my evolution as a coach(leader) and the phases I had to go through.

 

At the beginning of the HP program at UBC, we did a Practicum Enhancement survey
and an NCCP competency self-assessment. I want to reflect on the last two NCCP leadership core elements because I had a lower average than the rest of the cohort: 1-Empowers athletes, team members to develop and take responsibility for…  2-And Creates the vision and has a clear picture of the future.

 

1-Empowers athletes, team members to develop and take responsibility for…

An effective leader uses frank and direct communication with his teammates to develop interpersonal relationships based on mutual trust and respect; The leader is able to positively influence the members of his team, he knows how to sell his ideas in order to motivate his troops;The effective leader is also the one who guides the team towards success and who knows how to offer support and encouragement when needed. I scored myself low because at that time I had always been in my career an assistant coach and I didn’t perceive myself as a true leader, I lacked confidence in my leadership abilities, then I read  Kouses and Posner “The Leadership Challenge”. This book has shown that there are five primary ways they interact with those around them:

• Model the Way
• Inspire a Shared Vision
• Challenge the Process
• Enable Others to Act
• Encourage the Heart

After reading this book I realized that as an assistant coach I was very much in a leadership role and that my peers, athletes and other staff members rated me higher in those categories than I did myself in a 360-degree feedback process.

• Enable Others to Act and Encourage the Heart are my strong suits, they have always been, they are part of my personality, I learn this year to recognize it and use them to the fullest. It gave me enough confidence to start my own karate club. I work with a small group of athletes who were in a traditional karate system but were looking to develop as high-performance Olympic style karate athletes! We are already starting to have success at the provincial, national level.
• One of our athletes recently went to the youth world cup pushed an athlete that was ranked as high as number 7 in the world to a draw (lost by decision of the judges)

2- Creates a vision and has a clear vision of the future

A leader must have a vision for the future and be able to anticipate events in order to be able to effectively manage the changes that may occur! I lacked the confidence to be that man that inspires a shared vision.

By creating my own club I build a platform to be that kind of leader, I worked on how I presented myself  as a coach, I used Facebook for that by putting up  inspiring  training videos, I wrote articles and shared my personal views on nutrition strength and condition and WKF (World Karate Federation) karate.

I didn’t recruit anybody, these athletes and parents came to me. Some instructors and not happy, but that is exactly how I was able to have the small team that I’m working with today. I was able to anticipate some of these reactions and calm everyone down. I was also able to anticipate the difficulties and obstacles these young athletes might face making the transition from tradition karate to sports karate.

I’m always looking  to positively influence my team  and guide them towards a common vision:

-Be the best that they can be!

-Be willing to work hard, with discipline and passion!

-Do things for the right reasons (performance at all costs is out of the question)

-Believe that they can achieve anything!

-Perform well in school and go to the highest heights in their sport: I recently invited Alexandra Recchia who is a five-time world championships medalist, many times European champion and France National champion but most all a lawyer in Paris. She passed her Bar exam one month before winning two gold medals at the world championships!

Inspiration is everything and I’m willing to do anything to inspire my team and keep them on the path on that common vision we all share.  Communicating with my team and practicing active listening is critical
Identifying the concerns and aspirations of people around me, not just my own, allows me as a leader to join, inspire more people to my cause. athletes in a club need to have a common vision that they share with each other and their coach to be even more involved.

I share inspiring personal stories all the time and talk about my vision for the future, and how I arrived at that conclusion. I plan and share with them short- and medium- and long term objectives, show them how they can contribute collectively to the obtain expected results with Gap analysis presentations, structured annual plans. Last but not least I always acknowledge their accomplishments and make them feel good about themselves, the human growth experience is one of the main reasons why I’m coaching!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In my last blog about this core competency, I talked about doing things for the right reasons and not letting our egos getting in the way of our decisions as coaches

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A few months have gone by since that blog post and I have been confronted with major decisions concerning my coaching career. When I started the HPCTL program my goal was to secure a job on the Canadian national team. I was an “event coach” on the national team and I was advocating an assistant coaching position because it did not exist at the time. Our national federation finally opened assistant coaching positions! Naturally, I applied thinking I had a very good chance of landing one, but unfortunately, I wasn’t chosen! My dream and my goal since 2005 was to be a coach on the national team and representing Canada all over the world helping athletes reach their goals.

So I started to go for my NCCP level 1, I was a coach on the provincial team for a year since 2004. I was extremely proud of being a provincial coach!  Then eventually, I did my levels 2 and 3.

I became a permanent resident in 2008, it’s a long story but it took me 20 years to get my permanent resident status, the odds were against me but I persevered, that’s the story of my life and also the story of my coaching career.

I went on to be the first karate coach in Quebec to complete the comp-Dev coaching program, that meant that I was getting closer to my goal. In 2013 I applied to the National Coaching Institut in Quebec and got accepted and became the first karate coach in Quebec to be accepted at the Institut to complete the advanced coaching diploma since my mentor during my UBC program Mr. Gerard Lauzière.

In January 2014, I finally got my Canadian citizenship and a few months later I was chosen as an “event” coach for karate Canada and went on to represent Canada as a coach at the Pan American championships, it was one of the proudest happiest times of my life.

Fast forward to February 2017, I found out that I wasn’t selected as an assistant coach on the National team! I must admit that it was one of the most depressing times of my career. It forced me to think about my career, the impact I had as a coach on athletes, the people that I worked with and how I was perceived by the people making the decision, board members, administrators etc…

In the past, I rarely took the time to reflect on those things, and my program at UBC helped me realize that. I learned to develop my critical thinking skills! I also learned that by taking responsibility for our own coaching critical thinking processes, we are taking action to analyze and adapt our approach to decision-making and mostly problem-solving. By doing that we put ourselves in a much stronger position to lead and succeed in our profession.

Last April, I received a phone call by a French coach (of Senegalese origin) and he offered me an opportunity to work with him on the National team of Senegal! I met this man in 2012 at the world championships in Paris and he told me that he had been following me on Facebook because I posted a lot of training video’s and notes, and that wanted to work with me someday. Every time I saw him in international competitions we used to talk for hours about coaching in general and gap analysis! He was named the head coach for the national team in my country of origin and immediately thought of hiring me on the coaching staff!

So I was now faced with a big decision to make:

– Putting my career on hold for another chance to coach for Canada or stepping outside my comfort zone and taking the job on the Senegalese national team?

I’m from Senegal and very proud of the land of my forefathers but I have been living in Canada for the

past 32 years, I did all my professional career in this country, I’m about to graduate from UBC in high-performance coaching, I was forged in the Canadian system! I  fought and sacrificed a lot to get my Canadian citizenship against all odds.

Decisions come with consequences, and I came analyze the impact of my decision on the I athletes of my own dojo that I started to develop. I also work with Canadian National team athletes on their strength and conditioning, I was still a provincial team coach and most of the athletes on that team are on the Canadian team…The word conflict of interest came to mind! So I consulted with a Leadership coach,  Miss Dina Bell Laroche and this is what came out of that meeting:

 topic: To ensure I am managing conflict of interest situations in accordance with my values

 

Main insights:

 

• Conflicts occur all the time. The key is to manage them in accordance with legal expectations, organizational policies and procedures and one’s values.
• Ensure that I am clearly communicating with all the parties so that everyone involved understands situations when I might be conflicted and the measures I will take to avoid or eliminate the conflict, including recusing myself.
• Create a “Code to live by” that is shared by all the coaches and athletes that can help people understand how they are to deal with situations, including conflict of interest, when it arises.
• Ensure that I am aware of the impact these situations might have on me and to provide the necessary self-care required to balance all the pieces

 

Biggest takeaways:

• Seek the advice of an expert legal counsel

 

 

I also consulted my athletes who were all happy for me and told me to go for it, told me that when one door is closed, the other is open!

Gerard Lauziere my mentor told me that many great Canadian coaches went abroad to coach and came back a few years later better than ever, so this is an opportunity that I couldn’t pass by.

I accepted the job, and unfortunately, I had to let go of my position as a provincial coach that I occupied for the past 13 years.

Last June I went to Yaoundé Cameroon for my first competition with the Senior team, and we had lots of success, it was the African Championships. We won a few individual medals and won the most important one, the Team competition against the host country in the final it was amazing! So  I started off on a good foot!  The athletes and the coaching staff welcomed me and accepted me with opened arms right away!

This is by far the best professional decision I ever made! I’m blessed and I seized a great opportunity and I’m extremely happy today.

In conclusion,

Critical thinking is the ability to deal with the contradictions and problems of a tumultuous and unstable field like high-performance coaching. The best decisions are made using an approach that is fair, objective, accurate and based on information that is relevant to the situation.

 

I think that if it wasn’t for my experience at UBC, I would have made lots of mistakes in this process but instead, I took the time to reflect on myself as a leader, as a coach and the impact I have on people around me (good or bad) and went out and sought advice from my peers from my cohort, my mentors, my athletes and of course my family and at the end of the day I’m happy and comfortable with my decision!