Building a Community of Practice: A New Approach to Grassroots Coaching.
If you are a coach in grassroots sports this opportunity is for you:
A friend of mine attends a weekly meeting. When the developer speaks everyone listens; the same is true of the Sales Director. However, when the person who answers the customer queries speaks up, others dismiss their ideas.
Maybe what you have to say doesn’t matter if the boss doesn’t like it.
But that doesn’t matter in grassroots sports because you don’t have a boss. There are hardly ever any meetings. And just because the kids run around like lunatics, parents are busy, and the committee has better things to do, that doesn’t mean that……oh wait a minute.
No one is listening.
The term “grassroots” means to gather people at a local level to create change at a national level. Oddly, sports organisations structure things the opposite way — starting at the national level to create change at a local level. It’s easy to think that how we organise sports is out of order.
But there is a solution, and the boss — if you had one — probably wouldn’t like it: it’s called a Community of Practice (CoP).
To understand the difference between a project team or a task force and a community of practice, it helps to think about the task.
If you organise to the task, that’s a project — let’s say you are planning on putting up a new clubhouse. Once all the jobs are handed out and the clubhouse is up, that’s it, it’s done.
A community of practice, on the other hand, views the task based on its value. If the task has value, you stay on the task and practice. If not, you move on.
Being a good coach is about practice, yet formal coach education places the value on completion, not practice. It’s less about a lifetime of learning and more about getting the job done. So, how do you find the task that brings the most value to your coaching practice? What wall do you lean your ladder up against?
In a community of practice, you won’t all be wearing the same colour polo shirt, and the boss won’t have called the meeting. That’s on you. In fact, the community of practice “finds the energy” in the room and set the agenda, not the people at the top.
And that’s the opportunity that a community of practice offers grassroots coaches. Coach education shifts to what the coach needs, not what the sport or organisation thinks we want. Those who lead now serve, and those who have learned to follow, learn to lead.
Here’s what to look for in a community of practice:
- Find the Energy: Find the energy, find the subject. A community of practice is organised around a subject that inspires practice.
- Find the Others: If your boss wants you to practice, it’s not a community, that’s a condition. On the other hand, if you choose to practice, it pays to think about the community with which you practice.
- Adopt the Behaviour: People like us do things like this. If it works, adopt it; if it doesn’t, you might be in the right place to work it out and change the culture.
In an ideal world, you already know the subject that brings the energy for you. But, that’s not often the case, and if you are anything like me, I could pick a few subjects to go deep on. So let’s take a look at what it takes.
Let your feet do the talking. The rule of two feet states “If at any time you find yourself in a situation where you are neither learning nor contributing — use your two feet and move to someplace more to your liking.”
The key to a community of practice is permission. People have to turn up off their own backs, not because it’s their job or the boss has told them but because they believe in what is happening in the room. It’s the one rule that, if broken, sees the mislabelling of a task force or a project group as a community of practice.
I can tell you that I started Coach Camp not because I was ready to start a community of practice but because there was nowhere for me to go and talk about what I was working on. So I built it. And in building Coach Camp I realised that there was something way more powerful at play.
Advocacy.
Think back to the customer service rep at a work meeting. In speaking up on behalf of the clients, they are learning to speak up for what they believe in. When we believe in something bigger than us, it rubs off.
“This is not my final answer” is the mantra of Coach Camp, because it’s a place where people accept your first answer not as your final answer but as a place to start. It’s also a place of practice. A place to build connections, ask about what other people are working on, and share what you have seen that interests you.
There is no rush to find a subject that inspires, guides, and binds you to others, but there is a need to practice.
Finding a group of people, a community, willing to practice and interact is necessary. It’s also possible provided you are ready to do things a little differently. Vicki Pozzebon, of Prospera Partners, put a group of local farmers and chefs into a room to talk about how they could solve each other’s problems. After a little nurturing, the result was a new way of working that improved the supply chain.
Could you sit around a table with a cricket coach, a squash coach, and a group of junior school teachers to talk about helping kids hit, throw, and catch a ball?
Probably.
Ideas spread fast when birds of a feather flock together, and that’s one of the strengths of homogeneous groups, but its weakness is the stagnation of ideas. Not so in groups that are diverse and inclusive, only common ground is difficult to come by and communication can be slow. That’s the challenge -using both convergent and divergent thinking to solve the problems of the day.
And that’s really what a community of practice is; an exchange of information across a newly formed group based on necessity. At the heart of a community of practice is the unavoidable need to do something. A desire to see new groups and new dynamics created as old and tired power dynamics are broken down.
New information creates new norms. Now, people like us do things like this. Only this time, people like us are chefs, growers, and consumers united by a new and shared repertoire.
The dictionary defines repertoire as “A range of things that we can do.” If you’re ready to develop, share, and create a new range of things you can do, then perhaps you will consider joining or creating a community of practice. I don’t need to describe the alternative; you already know what this looks like.
The choice is yours.
