Why do old coaches get fired?

Taking a (needed) break today from the seemingly endless series of 'Robots that are coming to take your job and destroy everything you love' posts and getting back to something far, far more important - sports!

I caught an excellent piece on the AJC College Football blog featuring college coaching legend, and the current head football coach at my alma mater, the University of South Carolina, Steve Spurrier. Spurrier, also known as the Head Ball Coach, has has a legendary collegiate playing and coaching career. He won the Heisman Trophy as the nation's best college player in 1966, had a 10-year NFL playing career, and then has had a stellar college coaching run starting at Duke, then Florida, (winning a national title in 1996), and finally at South Carolina. At Carolina, Spurrier has led the Fighting Gamecocks to three consecutive 11 win seasons and become the most successful coach in school history.

But now, at 68 years of age, some observers are wondering just how much longer Spurrier can continue to put in the work and successfully compete at the highest level of college football, and in a position that is notorious for insanely long hours, tremendous pressure to win, and significant demands on ones time. Or, said differently, some are asking, 'Is Spurrier, or any coach of more advanced years, still able to get the job done?'

To that, in a recent AJC piece, Spurrier offered what I think was one of the sharpest observations about age and on the job performance, and one that resonates and applies just about in every field.

Check out the take below:

“I will tell you what is neat. You look around at college basketball now, and there’s Jimmy Boeheim, who is almost 70 years old. He has got the only undefeated team in the country. Larry Brown is at SMU. He’s 73, and I think they’re a top 10 team. Mike Krzyzewski is in his upper 60s and so forth. Coaches don’t get fired for being older coaches. They get fired for not winning. 

Love that take from the Head Ball Coach. 

Coaches, (or usually pretty much anyone working in a company/industry that cares about winning), don't get fired solely because they seem too old or that somehow the game or business has passed them by. Coaches (young and old) get fired because they don't win. Winning makes everyone look better, younger, smarter.

More from the HBC:

"It all comes down if you are winning and losing, if you’re recruiting well, and if your program is on the upbeat and it’s positive. That’s what we all shoot for and obviously it’s not that easy to do.

“But the age of a coach really has nothing to do with it.”

This may seem like a kind of throwaway concept, or just something really obvious, i.e. keep performing at a high level and usually anyone's job is safe. But as I know I have posted about on the blog here, and has become an increasingly prevalent dynamic in many US businesses, employees are getting older and older, and the percentage of people age 55 and up still in the workforce keeps climbing.

We could all do for reminding ourselves from time to time that unless there are some really specific and challenging physical elements to the job, that often age, by itself, simply does not matter when evaluating performance. And we have to get used to working with, learning from, and leveraging these older employees.

Old coaches get fired not for being old. They get fired for not winning. Which is the same reason young coaches get fired.

Is it your turn to shut up? There's an app for that...

A couple of months ago I joined my friend Kris Dunn the HR Capitalist, and Mike Carden the CEO of Human Resources technology vendor Sonar6 for a webcast titled 'Please Shut Up: The Idiot Proof Coaching Tool for Managers'. The presentation was about some simple, yet powerful strategies managers could use to become more effective as performance coaches.  You can still access the replay here. And you should give it a listen. The audience feedback was phenomenal, save for the one person that complained that perhaps the three of us were a bit 'too jocular'.

As you may be able to tell from the Sonar6 webcast presentation title, shutting up was a big part of the coaching tool that we talked about - the main point was that all too often managers tend to dominate these kinds of performance discussions, prattling on and on about what the employee needs to do to become more effective, to stop acting like an idiot, and to finally come around and see the bosses way of doing things.

As those of you with kids understand, this kind of browbeating, 'dominate the conversation' approach really begins to lose effectiveness on them at around age 11 or 12. Maybe sooner.

So maybe you buy in to the notion that whether you are in performance coaching conversations with employees, or interviewing candidates for open positions, that shutting your trap just a little more often would be a good strategy. Or maybe you are trying to convince hiring managers or recruiters on your team that 'actually letting the candidate talk' might be the best way to help make some of those tricky cultural fit judgments, then be cheerful, as is the case for almost everything these days - there's an app for that.

The Talk-O-Meter is an iPhone app that uses voice recognition and biofeedback to calculate, in real time, which person in a conversation is doing most of the talking. Simply fire up the app, set the iPhone on the table in between the participants, do a quick voice level and tone calibration, and from there the Talk-O-Meter monitors the conversation in 1, 3, or 5-minute intervals. At the end of each interval, the app displays a bar split into two colors, representing the ratio of who spent the most time jawboning.

Face it, almost all of us like the sound of our own voices. It can be really hard to warm up to the notion that the other person might actually have something important, interesting, and relevant to add to our own little daily soliloquies. I get that.

But a simple little tool like the Talk-O-Meter might be just the thing you need to get a bit of self-awareness going, and may even help you see just how much you are dominating the proceedings, be it a performance review/coaching session or an interview.

Or when faced with your next meeting with Mr. or Ms. Knows it All and isn't afraid to make sure you know that they know it all, just do a quick, and sly Talk-O-Meter drop on them and show them the error of their ways.

What do you think - would this kind of an application be a useful coaching tool?

PLEASE SHUT UP - and other bits of useful advice

This Thursday, April 14,  I will be joining the original HR gangsta, the HR Capitalist himself Kris Dunn, and the crew from your favorite New Zealand-based HR Technology company Sonar6, for the latest edition in the Fistful of Talent webcast series, this time in a little presentation entitled, "PLEASE SHUT UP: The Idiot-Proof Coaching Tool for Managers".  

Our friends at Sonar6 are hosting this event, and so far they seem curiously trusting in the eventual nature and quality of the content that KD and I will present. For that, we simultaneously salute and pity them.

Here are the details you need to know if you want to join over 4,000 of your friends, colleagues, and competitors that have already registered as we dop the knowledge this Thursday.

From the 'official' Sonar6 call to action:

"This month we’re teaming up with Kris Dunn and Steve Boese from Fistful of Talent to bring you The Idiot-Proof Coaching Tool for Managers.

On April 14, 4:00 PM EDT/1:00pm PDT (April 15 8am NZ / 6am Sydney) we’ll be introducing the tool at a one-hour webinar that will cover:  

• When managers should SHUT UP
• The best time to make team members brainstorm solutions
• How to wrap up the coaching conversation
• The top 5 ways managers screw this all up

This isn’t about technology (not even Sonar6!); it’s about having better performance conversations regardless of how you collect performance information.

And if you can’t make the webinar you can still grab the e-book, which will cover the same awesome stuff.

Register for the webinar & e-book today!"

Wow. Cool stuff. Very professional looking marketing copy.

But here is the reason I think this is good content. When you are talking, you aren't learning. Whether you are talking to your staff, your boss, or your kids - when your lips are flapping it is pretty much a one-way street heading out of town. Sure, you have to talk to get your super important points across. And the staff, your spouse, your kids, they are just hanging on every bit of wisdom coming out of your trap, right?

Sure.

On the webcast this Thursday we'll shed some light on why zipping it can be the best strategy in your management bag of tricks. We will share a simple 6-step tool, (I know 6 steps sounds like a lot, but 4 of them are really easy, trust me), that will allow you and any managers on your team to more effectively coach the people that do the real work in the time it takes to nuke a Hot Pocket.

You should sign up for the webcast. Truly. If nothing else, to make sure you will have something to openly mock on the Twitter stream, (hashtag #idiot).

Actually I am not sure that Sonar6 wants to be associated with a hashtag of #idiot, but so be it.

The Wisdom of Jeff Van Gundy

The always entertaing former NBA coach turned announcer Jeff Van Gundy was reflecting on the difficulty that many coaches have with connecting with their much younger and far wealthier players.  Van Gundy's opinion was that a coach's message can, over time, start to lose its resonance, and it's effectiveness. JVG

Van Gundy made what I thought was an excellent point in the discussion:

If you as leader are the only one that always has to tell the truth, then you need more leaders on the team.

It makes sense. If the coach, manager, or leader is the sole voice of the organizational 'truth', he or she will always be fighting an uphill battle. In the NBA, Van Gundy felt that you needed one or two players, preferably star players or at least starters, that were completely on board with the coach's approach and could help to reinforce the 'right' way to prepare, practice, and play. These respected players could help keep the team together, and serve as a kind of validation for the coach's program.

I think this concept can apply in corporate organizations as well. Work groups and teams all have some natural leaders, roles models, and respected members. Managers that can forge understanding and connection with these leaders will likely have a better opportunity to fold in all the entire team, perhaps leading to a more cohesive, and better functioning group.

This idea of leveraging key internal leaders or champions also has application in tools and technologies that are being increasingly deployed inside organizations to facilitate collaboration in the enterprise.  Technologies like wikis, forums, and microblogs are often positioned by project leaders as solutions that will bring significant value to all members of the organization. But they also can have 'adoption' problems, with many employees reluctant to replace traditional and proven methods of collaboration (e-mail, phone, voice mail, shared network drives) with the new processes and tools.

Recruiting and deploying 'champions', a few key and hopefully respected employees to serve as guides and leaders in the adoption of these new approaches, and that serve as examples for the other members of the organization to follow is often a critical success factor in these projects. These are the ones that will kick-start forum discussions, post new findings on a wiki page, and actively share bookmarks, and tag and organize content.  Without these leaders, your project may not thrive.

Just like the great JVG says, if you as coach, leader, or technology evangelist are the only one 'telling the truth' you are going to have problems getting everyone to see the light.