“Leadership is Solving Problems”

“Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.” - Colin Powell

I would say leadership as a coach is not just solving problems, but teaching people how to solve problems. In a big picture sense, you always need to solve the problems that are impacting your organization. But once we get to playing games, we can’t solve the problems anymore. They have to solve the problems.

Are we teaching them to solve the problems themselves? Finding a balance in practice between how much you stop, talk and teach versus letting them play through mistakes is challenging. Colin Powell didn’t have that luxury. But the more hands on we are as coaches, the more we are inhibiting their ability to solve the problems themselves. And with 5:00 to play in a tie game, they need to solve the problems themselves.

Ask them questions in practice instead making loud, declarative statements all the time. When someone commits a turnover ask them “What did you see there?” and let them explain it to you. There’s a big difference between that and “Stop turning the ball over!” You are giving them a chance to process what happened, think about what they saw and figure out a better way to make the right play, instead of simply being judged on the result. When you yell at them to stop turning it over you are making it very clear what the problem is, but you aren’t giving them a road map on how to solve the problem.

I think effective coaches at times have to get comfortable with practice being sloppy and chaotic. Not to say you should stop coaching, but understand even if it doesn’t look great and things are erratic your players are getting used to an uncomfortable environment and how to figure things out. If you stop practice every time something bad happens, they aren’t learning to navigate it. They are learning to stop doing bad things.

Don’t just solve the problems for your players. Teach them to be problem solvers. The more ownership of the process they have, the better your team will be.