Blog | Focus on Them Connections

Generational Differences – Not Bad, Not Good, Just Different

January 28, 2017 | No Comments

An important characteristic of those whom you are coaching, educating, or leading whether you are a coach, teacher, or employer are generational differences. The students who are graduating from college are now entering a workforce in which there could be four or more generations working for the same company. This is challenging and at the same time exciting. However, it is important to confront two fundamental assumptions that each generation makes about the younger generations entering a given organization. Cam Marston, in his 2007 book, Motivating the ‘What’s in it for Me’ Workforce, highlights these two assumptions. First, the senior
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Leaders Need to Know “Them”

December 28, 2016 | No Comments

When working with a group of students, players, or employees, have you ever found yourself starting a sentence . . . When I was their age? When I was in school? When I got my first job? We did this, or we did that, or this or that worked for me, or we would have never done that. I know that I have done it. In fact, I still do it, but not as often. All of these statements reflect an inward-looking focus on you. I can hear you saying to yourself, he spent his last article emphasizing the importance
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Leaders Need to Know Self

October 26, 2016 | No Comments

In my last post, I introduced the five basic questions at the foundation for the Collaborative Coaching and Leadership Action Model. The basic premise of this model is that coaching, educating, and leading are about taking a person or group from where they are now to some place new. To accomplish this, it is important to understand ourselves. The importance of knowing self has become increasingly obvious as I have developed as coach, leader, and educator. In one of the first National Soccer Association of America courses of my soccer coaching career, Doug Williamson, who became my coaching mentor, emphasized
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Questions-Based Action Leadership

October 11, 2016 | No Comments

The more I practice leadership, think about leadership, read about leadership, and hear people talk about leaders they admire, the clearer it becomes. To help facilitate your ability to lead and coach, it is important for you to Know yourself; Know the learning, behavioral, and motivational styles, among others, of those you lead; Use methods that are developmentally appropriate for your students, players, and employees to facilitate and maximize learning; Employ methods to articulate where it is you want your team, class, or organization to go, and develop a plan to get there; Develop a culture that continuously assesses and
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Collaboration – Get to the End-in-Mind Together

August 7, 2016 | 1 Comment

In my last article, the focus was on the importance of the coach, educator, or employer creating an environment that engages individual students, players, or employees in such a way that they can construct new knowledge and develop new skills that helps them get to the end we have-in-mind (i.e., goals, outcomes, etc). Designing your pathways to your end-in-mind using activities and approaches that promote questioning, thinking, and learning from one another will build a sense of intellectual engagement and camaraderie that will have positive effects on your group’s achievement. In addition, the process of interacting with other people requires
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CHANGE INVOLVES LEARNING

July 4, 2016 | No Comments

As a coach, educator, and/or leader, we are pursuing some kind of end that we have in our mind. We call them goals, objectives, or outcomes. In some way, shape, or form to achieve these ends –in-mind, change is involved. It is crucial to recognize that, whether you are a coach trying to help your player learn a new skill, an educator helping a student obtain new knowledge, or an employer training their employees, all of these activities involve change. Change involves learning, whether we are doing something new or trying to do something better. Recent developments in educational research
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Communication: Gender Influences

April 12, 2016 | No Comments

In the book, “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus’, John Gray emphasized the importance of the differences in communication style and emotional needs of men and women. John Medina in “Brain Rules” indicates there are structural and biochemical differences between the brains of men and women that contribute to differences in emotional responses, communication, and the development of relationships. In addition to the natural differences, on-going research documents the influence that the environment has on men’s and women’s self-perception and perception of the other gender. Whether it is nature or nurture, and likely both, we must acknowledge there
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Communication: Nonverbal Language

March 23, 2016 | No Comments

There are many old sayings that come to mind when one considers nonverbal communication. These include “your actions speak louder than your words” or “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Work by researchers at the Nonverbal Group indicate that the amount of communication that is nonverbal varies between 60 and 90% on a daily basis. Regardless what the actual numbers are, nonverbal communication can provide a person with lots of information. Sometimes this nonverbal language communicates a different message than our spoken word. The way we talk, walk, sit, and stand provides lot of information that can have an
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Show Them You Care

March 13, 2016 | No Comments

Whether you are coach, educator, or other type of leader, you have the potential to have a significant impact on those you lead. If you think back about a teacher, coach or boss who had a major impact on you, I suspect one of your key memories is how they cared about you. As you consider the ways that you may impact others who look up to you, consider the extent to which your actions show that you care about them. Teddy Roosevelt said, “Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.” For many people,
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Communication: Establish Expectations

February 29, 2016 | No Comments

Building on my last blog related to creating an environment for communication, it is important to establish an expectation of positive communication and interaction among members of your team – players, coaches and parents. In general, there is a tendency to see the things that went wrong rather than what went right. We definitely need to identify areas for improvement but we need to expect a culture of positive communication from those we lead so we can improve in the future. Establishing a positive communication environment is promoted through accepting the differences that people have in their behavioral and motivational
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