Professional Development: Structural Tension Charting and One-on-One Coaches Meetings

By: Mike Hughes, CAA

Developing a plan to enhance your coaches' professional development is essential for all athletics administrators to have in place. When establishing how you are going to hold coaches' meetings, the key elements to consider are establishing the culture you want in your athletic department in terms of professional development and relationship building with your staff. Without the emphasis, we want to see in educationally based athletics being modeled by the Athletics/Activities Director, the messages we send to our staff about what is important to us gets skewed. Continuing to learn, grow, and build relationships regardless of how many years someone has been coaching, must be an example we set for our staff.

But having a plan for professional development is not enough. Yearly, I had what I felt was a solid plan to deliver professional development to our coaching staff. That belief was rocked last year where in the course of a few months. In that time, I nearly lost the best coach I had on our staff over issues that he was having with my communication with him and areas where he felt I had fallen short on following through with items we discussed earlier in the year and secondly, in feedback I was able to get from my annual survey of my performance I send to all our coaches. In asking our coaching staff what they felt were the benefits or our professional development session in my annual evaluation, I saw a significant disconnect in the perceived benefits that I hoped our staff would be getting from the monthly all-staff PD and what they felt the benefits were. They felt there were too many meetings that were too long and at the wrong time of day. My messages that I thought were being well received and taken in by our staff was not hitting the mark.

In my eighteen years as an athletics administrator, I realized there are no perfect professional development plans. I have tried many forms of my professional development meetings: monthly meetings with the entire coaching staff, seasonal meeting with the entire staff, and then monthly meetings with just head coaches. In my experience, there are good elements to all those plans, but what I have found from those systems is that there was not the intentionality or relationship building that I felt was essential to create the type of professional relationship I wanted with my coaching staff. I also knew I had to lessen the time commitment that was hurting our entire coaching staff. I knew I had to try something different or risked losing my connection to my staff. There is nothing worse than a staff that attends PD out of compliance, not to grow and develop.

What I decided to try was an approach to my PD with coaches that gave me the intentionality that I wanted and ability to build the robust relationships and trust with all my staff, especially our head coaches without sacrificing the professional development materials I felt were essential and affirmed the staff that I valued them as I was taking steps towards change with the information that they provided in the survey. It allowed me to have a strategic plan to meet with all our staff without being considered too many meetings and yet the direct contact I needed to reach everyone at their level. I went to a hybrid system that I call one-on-one coaches meetings. The system I put into place had a different time commitment depending on coaching role and time of year. I will go through the plan and detail how it helped our athletic department become much more transparent and accountable.

Head coaches and structural tension charting:

We started the year out with all our head coaches getting together in early August for a half day retreat for professional development that was based on our goal setting and structural tension charting. Structural tension charting is a way for any individual to create their vision/goal for their programs (I had six major visions/goals on my structural tension chart this year) and do so in a way that is pragmatic and measurable. After you establish and detail your vision/goal,you then detail the current reality that exists in those areas. The tension that is between the goal/vision and the current reality is where you develop your action steps to move from current reality towards accomplishing your goal/vision. This system is very strategic for each coach to develop the thoughts on what they really want to measure in their yearly growth for their programs. It is also very flexible. If coaches could accomplish goals ahead of schedule or hit obstacles, the chart was malleable to those situations and could allow for adjustments. I haven't found a system for setting goals that helped clarify the process and what steps were needed to complete the goals that were established that was nearly as effective as structural tension charting.

This structural tension chart meeting was the key to start our year off with the type of PD that really enhanced each person's knowledge and understanding of what my goals and vision was for the year and what each individual head coach was looking to build and contribute to our entire athletics department. This was more than just token goal setting. It was a way for the culture we wanted to be in place in our athletic department to be transparent for all our head coaches through the creation of their charts and their understanding of how critical each program was to the success of the others. It was a way for our staff to be very intentional about their programs individual needs and goals, while also having me share my structural tension chart for the year with them that relied on their efforts. The openness about my goals/vision and where our current reality was, showed the staff that not only was my vision and goals audacious, but there were also measurable action steps that were going to have to be a priority for me to achieve, but it relied on them doing their part. This built trust and collaboration with the key stakeholders that I needed to invest so heavily in our athletic department culture set up the entire year of PD for our head coaching staff.

During the Season:

For each head coach that was in-season, I would meet with them each weekly in a one-on-one coaching meeting. This meeting may have been during their planning period or before school for our in-building head coaches and for our out of building coaches after their practice session was complete. This is a lot of coaches' meetings to hold in one week's time and took a tremendous amount out of my schedule, but I felt that this system was the way to have all coaches feeling valued and all coaches being held accountable for their program in every regard. I felt the intentionality and connection that we could have during those meetings was exactly what we needed to communicate anything that had come up and each head coach wasn't limited by a large group meeting to address individual issues they had because the setting was one-on-one and they could speak freely. The individual time helped with the PD that was important for that coach in the focus we had for the year. The individual time allowed us to go through their structural tension chart weekly and the time we needed to discuss any issues that we were having in their individual program. It allowed me to distribute information to the head coaches to deliver to their coaching staffs on important events coming up for the school, which empowered our head coaches to take ownership of more materials to their staff. The meetings were generally shorter than 30 minutes, but at times were an hour long depending on the materials we needed to cover or the issues that were arising with their structural tension chart. At first, the head coaches were skeptical that this would save them time, but in the end, it was clear that the weekly meeting connection helped with their accomplishment of their goals/vision and led to the one-on-one connection that was needed. It also saved everyone time. Communication was maximized and the time commitment was appropriate for their role on our staff, but still ended up being the right amount of time because of less emails and phone calls that were needed with other systems.

Out of season head coaches:

Out of season head coaches would meet with me once a month. These were check-ins on their structural tension chart and ways for me to communicate deadlines and other pertinent information to them when we were meeting less frequently. This time was critical, especially for our winter and spring coaches who would have to be working toward their plan months in advance and really helped keep them focused and looking forward to their seasons. For our fall coaches, it was a way to continue the dialogue toward their off-season goals and what was upcoming in the following fall. The check-ins were always well received and helped stimulate a needed immediate to-do item for either a coach or myself.

The Plan for all staff PD:

For our entire staff, we put a system in place for all coaches to get together for meetings every six weeks to ensure that the culture building and educational PD we put into place was being delivered. Although I didn't require a structural tension chart for each of our assistant and volunteer coaches, I asked that the head coaches developed a system to hold each member of our staff accountable that was on the head coaches chart for us to discuss. We cut the meeting time down to 60 minutes and I planned the time to be engaging and thought provoking and involving a lot of collaboration. These meetings always had a theme that was something connected to our major focus for the year. I incorporated independent reading to accompany the all staff meetings at times and this was a great prompt to drive the meetings. What I found was that by meeting less with the entire staff and being more poignant with my presentation and materials, we could have effective staff development that helped our staff join more freely in open discussions and helped shape our staff into a much more cohesive unit. These group sessions also helped us go through nuts and bolts information that every coach needs for our school, district and state timelines. I also found that having food there really helps the entire mood of the group who is sacrificing time with family to attend these sessions.

Open Door Policy:

I also hold an open-door policy with any of my coaching staff. I asked that coaches valued my time and really came with a plan to our meeting with questions that they may have or anything they needed help with, but at times things needed to happen quicker and they needed and impromptu visit. Having an open-door policy allowed for our coaches to know that dropping in for an answer to a question and bounce ideas from me was certainly welcome and continued to build the trust that I was there for them when they needed.

There is no doubt that this system is the best system I have ever used. It helped me stay focused with our staff on what was important without it being in crisis mode, seeming rushed or worse, not interesting. The one-on-one coaches' meetings and structural tension charting kept meetings on point and relevant. The intentionality of the meetings helped everyone feel that their time was more valued.

Like I said earlier, there is no perfect system, just the system that is perfect for you and your staff. There is always refinement to be made to help make the system stronger, but the structural tension charting and one-on-one coaches meeting template has been impactful for our staff and I couldn't have asked for a better system to connect and build going forward.