Potter’s question is not how he wins games but how he sets the team up to win them: communication, skills, mental preparation and taking players towards what they want. Get that process right, he says, and they go out and win it themselves. If the win matters more to the coach than to them, he reckons he is in the wrong job. Watch the full masterclass: Culture relating to performance.
A team has a life of its own, made of roles, norms and relationships. Formal roles bring clarity, but the informal ones that emerge matter just as much for efficiency. Norms are the unwritten rules; setting values at the start of the season turns them into explicit guidelines. Relationships hit performance directly, so Joy points to Moreno’s sociometry, a secret questionnaire mapping who connects with whom, as a tool for picking a starting line-up. Watch the full masterclass: Building a powerful team.
Players commit when the group becomes an extension of themselves, so Joy builds identification deliberately: time together creates sympathy through the exposure effect, small victories get named so the group is worth belonging to, and the captain is chosen as the prototype others measure themselves against. Her test case is video homework. When only 60 per cent of a squad reviews their clips, stronger group identification is what lifts the rate. Watch the full masterclass: Building a powerful team.
One on ones happen all the time in McLeod’s programme, for two reasons. They show him where each player is at, the individual pieces beneath the collective IQ of the team, and they push players to own their development: one coach cannot get around 24 athletes, but 24 athletes managing themselves with the staff as a resource is far more productive. Watch the full masterclass: AMA with Shane McLeod.