Pro-Am: Ideal Team Structure, Leadership & Communication - iTofu's Blog

iTofu's Blog

Pro-Am: Ideal Team Structure, Leadership & Communication

Posted on October 15, 2016 at 03:34 PM.

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PRO-AM: TEAM STRUCTURE, LEADERSHIP & COMMUNICATION

This post will cover my personal philosophy of moving away from traditional hierarchal leadership as much as possible, in favor of a flat structure making collaborative decisions.

Pro-Am teams using this flat team structure should have a team of self-motivated people voluntarily taking on responsibility when possible.

What that eventually looks like is ultimately the team's collective opinion, but the graphic below might help:

This graphic above, borrowed from Agile Software Development methodology, demonstrates the difference between traditional teams and the self-organizing teams.

THE ROLE OF LEADERSHIP

Leadership should never be simply giving orders. In fact, outside of the necessity of the moment (example: "Run xxxx play") teams strive to stay away from telling people to do anything. Rather than anyone giving orders; each member of the team, but particularly the leader, responding with questions always challenging each other to think and mining for as much information as possible:

What do you see? �> I see�
What do you think? �> I think�
What would you like to do? �> I would like to�
What do you intend to do? �> I intend to�

The intention is creating a safe space to communicate what we are thinking, promote others to think/learn and revealing all relevant information. Revealing outlying observations and information is particularly important for two reasons:

People with outlying ideas could hold the key to a more effective means of solving a problem.
Acknowledging and hearing the dissenting opinion is the key making everyone feel heard.

Using questions in this manner can also be applied to when someone isn't playing particularly well. Rather than admonishing the person, we might ask, "Why do you think you're xxxxxx?"

Perhaps the person doesn't know, but even if we can change the form of self-talk, an interrogative form of self-talk has been proven to be more effective than affirmation or derogatory self-talk (Research: Motivating Goal-Directed Behavior Through Introspective Self-Talk).

SCHEDULED RETROSPECTIVE MEETING

The frequency of these meetings is up to the team, but to start I'd suggest before every Pro-Am session having a retrospective meeting, even if you play every day and the meetings are short. It seems excessive, but the line of communication needs to be open and team members must be encouraged to talk about what is on their mind and in the world of Pro-Am a few days seems like a long time. To be clear, as previously stated, it's up to the team.

The focus should be topics split into two groups:

What has gone well?
What hasn't gone well?

My personal experience is that this is best facilitated if you provide recordings of the previous games the Pro-Am team has played. For motivated players who chose to watch, they'll often bring some perspectives that were missed when playing at the moment.

Let's combine this section with the previous section to see what might that conversation look like?

TeamMember1: Watching the video, I've noticed the bigs are showing too much.
TeamMember2: What specifically are you seeing and what do you think about it?
TeamMember1: Often times in the pick 'n' roll, the big provides too much help and ends up getting beat on the roll. A switch would be nice, but in Pro-Am with 7'3" bigs, that isn't ideal.
TeamMember2: What would you like to do?
TeamMember1: {Explains}
Team discusses and makes a strategic decision.

I know that was super cheesy, but you get the idea.

ONE-ON-ONE MEETINGS WITH LEADERSHIP

Every section so far has talked about moving away from a traditional hierarchical leadership style and encouraging each player to communicate with constructive criticism. That being said, my experience has been that no matter how open your communication, some issues simply do not get openly communicated. At that point, one-on-one meetings are necessary.

My personal experience is that these meetings need to be weekly at least in the beginning after a Pro-Am team is formed. It seems excessive, but the reality is that until trust is formed within the team, people will often keep issues and roadblocks to themselves. I suggest making it less formal, I don't believe it's necessary for the team manager/leader to explicitly let the player know it is, in fact, a one-on-one meeting.

Here are some basic tips for the one-on-one meetings.

Do not inadvertently shift responsibility from the team onto you:
- Do not speak about task completion; you are inadvertently shifting the burden of responsibility for communication away team members and team meetings. Gently direct away from status reports.
- Do not make decisions that should be open to team meetings.
One-on-Ones are about their needs, their concerns, and their personal growth. Your job is to ask productive open-ended questions, to listen, and to follow-up constructively. Examples of informal questions:
- How do you things are going on our team?
- Is there anything I can do to help?

HOW TO HANDLE LOSSES

There will be losses, it's inevitable and it has to be okay for the team if the team is going to survive. Here are things that the team needs to do and what the team should not do:

Things we need to do:

Allow for input.
Remain calm. :-) Losses happen and it's okay if the team treat them as learning experiences.
Ask questions (as stated above), such as: "What did you see?", "What do you think happened?", "What can we do better?", et cetera.
Tell the group what you saw, what you thought, what you think we could do to improve, etc.
Group discussion is key, because often times the root cause is difficult to find and might require video review to even find it.

Things not to do:

Leave party.
Yell at or admonish people for their performance. (See "What is Leadership?" section above)

TEAM COMPOSITION TRAITS

This style of Pro-Am team, more than anything, requires thoughtful mature players. When looking for players, I think the ideal players are have these attributes:

Patient people. A team takes a long time to become great and there will be losses and setbacks.
Players interested in playing your vision for long-term playstyle: running plays, 3-2/4-1 configurations, running the break hard, etc. For example: I've always wanted the long-term focus to be on defense, running the fast break and running a spread half-court offense that has a lot of passing utilizing plays more than far more than an average team.
Self-motivated (...in NBA 2K lolol)
Players who communicate. I'm a quiet person, I'm not talking about the quantity of speaking in general, but rather simply communicating when necessary. I think it's difficult to have a player without a mic, I've literally seen players trying to message their strategic suggests via PSN during games... It's painful. Likewise, even the quietest team members need to be able to communicate key information such as, "I have life stuff going on at this time and won't be on" or "I struggle on XXXX and need help."
Players who can make a commitment to helping the team and participate regularly.

Here is a quote from Greg Popovich regarding what he looks in players: "We're looking for people � and I've said it many times � [who] have gotten over themselves, and you can tell that pretty quickly. You can talk to somebody for four or five minutes, and you can tell if it's about them, or if they understand that they're just a piece of the puzzle. So we look for that. A sense of humor is a huge thing with us. You've got to be able to laugh. You've got to be able to take a dig, give a dig � that sort of thing. And [you have to] feel comfortable in your own skin that you don't have all the answers. [We want] people who are participatory. The guys in the film room can tell me what they think of how we played last night if they want to. [Former Assistant GM] Sean Marks would sit in on our coaches' meetings when we're arguing about how to play the pick-and-roll or who we're going to play or who we're going to sit. We need people who can handle information and not take it personally because, in most of these organizations, there's a big divide. All of the sudden, the wall goes up between management and coaching and everybody is ready to blame back and forth and that's the rule rather than the exception. It just happens. But that's about people. It's about finding people who have all of those qualities. So, we do our best to look for that and when somebody comes, they figure it out pretty quick."
(source: Baxter Holmes of ESPN)

This sentiment isn't singular in the NBA, Warriors GM Bob Myers keeps the quote in his cell phone today.