Ric Charlesworth gave his keynote on building winning teams at 2017-12-15 for the Coach Conference that started of this platform. Back then we called ourselves hockeytoday.cc and we were thinking of doing two coach conference or so every year. But that changed to The Hockey Site later on and now we do some 20 masterclasses or workshops or panel talks every year.
Enjoy the video.
This was the very first online masterclass The Hockey Site ever ran, back in December 2017, and Ric Charlesworth used the hour to walk through what it actually takes to build a winning team. He draws on fourteen years coaching the Australian men's and women's national teams, but he is explicit from the start that most of it applies just as much to a club side, a regional squad or a school team.
He opens on ambition, with the simple claim that we usually end up where we aim, and then turns the camera around: what did his own players say they wanted from a coach? He surveyed them after five or six years in the job and gets to five answers, the last of which is the one most coaches find hardest to live with.
From there he moves through the ground he thinks every coach has to cover. Being yourself as a coach, and why borrowing someone else's persona gets found out. Knowing what you stand for, and the uncomfortable "until" he attaches to that. Standards, shortcuts and the obligation to make the environment enjoyable, whoever you are coaching. He then runs quickly through the coaching process using the GROW framework, and a set of skill development concepts: specificity, load, the challenge point, process versus outcome, and his own definition of skill as technique plus pressure.
He spends time on who your team actually is, beyond the players, and makes an argument about where the biggest untapped competitive advantage in sport sits. Video and analysis get their own section, with a before and after comparison of how coaching worked when nobody could see what had really happened.
On strategy and tactics he keeps it deliberately plain, and the part worth listening to closely is his view on the balance between possession and penetration, including what he told his players a position pass is allowed to be. Build the defence first, but never run a session without making goals. Be unpredictable to the opposition and predictable to each other. Get the set plays right. Team first.
The spine of the talk is four words: smart, healthy, diligent, skilled. He uses a story from outside sport about two researchers who were right for twenty five years while everyone told them they were wrong, and a story from a very hot Olympic tournament where his team did the thing everybody said was impossible, to make his point about innovation. Diligence comes with a question an old surgeon asked him every week as a medical student. He also shows two match clips, one about sportsmanship and shortcuts, one about what happens when a coach refuses to let a team settle for safe possession.
He closes with an acronym built from the word TRAGEDY, the list of things his squad consciously tried to avoid in the year before a home Olympics, and with a graph showing how both the team and he himself changed across eight years.
The part worth going deep on: candour
If there is one theme he presses hardest, it is this. Charlesworth argues that if you want to be outstanding, rather than merely fine, you need an environment where people say what they actually think.
His evidence is a quote he puts on screen from a famous player in another sport, looking back on a disastrous season at one of the richest clubs in the world. "Our problem this season was that there were too many strong personalities in the dressing room. We didn't communicate properly because we were too afraid of upsetting one another." Charlesworth's reading of that is the opposite of the obvious one. There were no strong personalities in that dressing room, he says, because strong personalities would have named the problem while the season was still rescuable.
He then makes it personal and practical. Our default response to criticism is fight or flight: we argue, or we walk away. Neither helps. So the coach has to become someone the players believe has their interests at heart and whose judgement they respect, because only then can the hard conversations actually happen. He lists some of them out loud, which is the uncomfortable bit: when you do that, it hurts our team, what might you do to change it. What do you think your greatest weakness is. What is stopping you doing something serious about it. You are not living up to the expectations of your teammates.
His own summary of the job is the line that sticks: coaching is about comforting the troubled and troubling the comfortable. He pairs it with a Harvard business line that followers want comfort, stability and solutions from their leaders, but that is babysitting. Real leaders ask hard questions, knock people out of their comfort zones, and then manage the distress that follows.
And that last clause is the one most of us skip. Asking the hard question is the easy half.
