Success and Teamwork

My Example of being part of a successful team is a fairly straight forward one. In high school I played soccer for 4 years and in those four years I managed to be a part of two fairly successful teams, my sophomore year and my senior year. The book talked about basketball and how coordination between players is necessary, and this is also the case in soccer, and it was very apparent during the two successful seasons that cohesion and everyone being on the same page was a major factor in our success. While there are many parallels in the two seasons, they were far from identical. Structurally, within the team both were a one-boss arrangement, with our coach being the boss, but that is pretty much where the similarities end. My sophomore year coach had been the varsity coach for several years before stepping down to the sophomore level to spend more time with his kids. What this meant was that he brought his varsity philosophy to the sophomore level, meaning he had ultimate authority on everything from formation to positions and tactics. This is very different from my senior year, where the varsity coach was the one who replaced the old varsity coach, essentially swapping positions. What the new varsity coach brought to the team was different than what I had experienced sophomore year in that, while still being a one-boss arrangement, he very rarely put himself in a place of complete authority or power, rather it in many ways was like an all-channel network with the coach leading the discussion and having the final say. An example of this is when our season began on the wrong note and we were struggling, we, the players, decided it was time for a change in formation, and came to the coach with this idea it was implemented and had a positive effect. This is an example of on of Katzenbach ad Smith’s characteristics of a high-quality team, that we held ourselves collectively responsible. This sort of thing would not have happened under my sophomore year coach, as he wanted to play ‘his system’, and everyone had to fit into ‘his system’ rather than finding a system that fit the team, meaning he was holding himself solely responsible for the success of the team. I believe that both years’ structures were good and both had their strengths and weaknesses. The first reason they worked for each of the coaches is because the team configurations fit their personalities, one being all about control and the other being more relaxed and open to experimentation. The second reason I think the two systems worked is because once we had gone through our sophomore year where we had learned ‘the system’ and understood it and learned more about the game in general, we were then able to make adjustments and apply what we had learned from our time under a strict system to then be more creative with a more hands off approach.

The thing I have not mentioned yet is how successful each of the teams were, because the success was relative to several factors. My sophomore year our team went undefeated in the regular season, 20-0, my senior year we only won 4 games in the regular season, but we were able to win regionals. The book talks about structures and how success is determined. In the case of both of my teams, Success was evaluated and determined in very different ways. Sophomore year, winning was the only form of success, our coach made sure every practice and every game that it was expected of us that we win, and in the end we did. Varsity year our expectations were no different, but after struggling at the beginning of the season, we had to reevaluate our goals. There was a team wide discussion where we as a team discussed where we saw ourselves heading and what could be done, if anything, to turn our season around, which culminated in a regional win. This is another example of a characteristic of a high-performing team, the ability for a team to shape purpose in response to a demand. Out of these two seasons, while to 20-0 run was fun, I feel as though me and my team succeeded more my senior year than my sophomore year. Being able to overcome unforeseen obstacles and push through tough times made that regional win that much more rewarding than the 20-0 record. In both of these cases the coach gave the team a direction, and if that works, as It did my sophomore year, fantastic, however if things don’t go quite as well as expected it is not just up to the coach but the entire team to create achievable goals so that success is still able to be achieved.