Pre-workshop reading and thought provokers on shared leadership in sports coaching.

1. Shared Leadership in Sports Coaching
@JohnStoszkowski

2. List the words you associate with each of the
following:
• Empowerment
• Leadership
• Independence
• Autonomy
• Self sufficiency
Devise a concise definition for each.

3. Empowerment and
athlete autonomy
within the coaching
process.
Sharing leadership.

4. Based on principle that coaches should empower
athletes by transferring control to them, thus
making themselves increasingly redundant.

5. Ethically appropriate in democratic society – individual
rights given high priority.
Coaches as people developers – obliged to provide
opportunities and encourage holistic progress.

6. List examples of controlling environments (authoritarian,
pressuring and dictating)?

7. List examples of autonomy supportive environments (social
contexts that support choice, initiation and understanding)?

8. What are the benefits of an autonomy supportive
environment?

9. Potential examples…
• Greater ownership and responsibility
• Intrinsic motivation to learn and improve
• Better decision making
• Task perseverance
• Greater retention and understanding of tactics
and skills
• Become more self-sufficient and self-aware as
athletes and people
• Enhanced teamwork

10. Authoritarian culture
within the profession
– coaches take charge
of each and every
situation.

11. Can coaches realistically fully share their leadership function with athletes?
– If so, which aspects? How equally? Under what circumstances?

12. Self Determination Theory considers autonomy not as
independence, but feelings of volitional control toward activities
– important as embraces the continuing necessary essence of
support.

13. Do those being empowered take up that
entitlement in an acceptable manner?
What if you don’t agree with the consensus
once it is reached?

14. How really
empowered are the
newly empowered?
Sharing power is risky
– do we only do it at
superficial levels?

15. Athletes’ perception of coaching role – do they think the coach is
not doing their job properly if more inclusive strategies are
followed?

16. Change vs. tradition – does the coaching context and culture
have inbuilt deterrents against smooth implementation of
shared leadership? What are they and why?

17. Does the coaching culture contain incompatible elements manifest
as contradictory values and beliefs co-existing in tension?

18. Culture informs deployment of
power which contributes to
the evolution and maintenance
of the culture.

19. Coaches dilemma – greater calls to share their leadership, yet in a
context of accountability they are often inhibited from doing so.

20. Consider:
• To what extent do you empower
your participants, facilitate
autonomy, and share
leadership?
• Remember the HOW and WHY.
• Reading on Blackboard.