The Importance of Role Clarity
The Importance of Role Clarity
Understanding your role, and how your role fit within the team's role, provides you with clarity and the ability to focus. Too often we can over-complicate situations, allowing irrelevant information, often information that we have no control over, to cloud our judgement and inhibit our performance. Two Lengths of the Pool, a book written by Sport Psychologist Simon Hartley, provides theory-backed, real life examples on how important role clarity can be. Simon's premise is to define your role in the simplest possible terms; another message reinforcing the idea of simplifying information.
The important factor in this message is that your role must be simple to understand, but also must focus on processes rather than outcomes. The swimmer, the focus of the book, found himself focusing on external outcomes such as gold medals and sponsors - this took his focus away from the task in hand, in turn impacting on his feelings, the pressure he perceived, his training programme and obviously his performance. Working with Simon, they simplified his role to one statement, focusing on nothing but processes, 'to swim two lengths of the pool as fast as I can'. If the swimmer focuses on these processes, he has a better chance of improving his performance and succeeding.
Focusing on processes, returns the control to the athlete. I worked with a striker who set himself targets to score 1 goal a game; I thought it was great that he was using goal setting for himself, but questioned the fact that his goal was completely out of his control. After a game, his team had one 3-1 - he didn't score but had a great game and set up all three goals. He wasn't happy with his 'performance' because according to his goal setting, he had failed! Once we recalibrated his goals to focus on processes, he would have more chance of succeeding - but more importantly he had provided himself with clear tasks to focus on within the game.
Back to the book, once the pair had defined the swimmer's role, they identified 5 key processes that if performed well would provide the best chances of delivering their role. So for a swimmer, these processes included tasks such as a fast start, a fast turn and exit, etc. These five key processes are important to narrow focus on the important tasks, but also allows an athlete to review their performance and identify how to improve a particular process. An athlete can mark themselves out of ten, this is subjective obviously what is important are the two follow up questions. What do you do well that makes you attribute that score to that task? What do you need to add to your process to increase your score by 1? This allows the athlete to highlight what they, as players, are doing well and also identify processes to improve on, almost creating an action plan for improvement.
If we do these two tasks with our players, they will have an understanding of their job within the team, and have clear processes that they can focus on delivering and improving continuously. Encouraging and supporting them to reflect on these processes will allow them to self evaluate and action plan their improvement.
Working in the Youth Development and Professional Development Phase, I used this book to help me to support the players. We created a job role per position, and five key processes to help them deliver their job to the best of their ability. At the top end of the game, where jobs are on the line - the coach has to be able to trust a player to step on to the pitch and deliver their role. Giving players an understanding of their role, particularly in the top end of YDP and PDP, will give players a better chance to be able to deliver when required. If you understand your job and the processes you need to deliver, there is less pressure whether playing in a development fixture or one that counts a little more!
Summary
Understanding your role provides clarity and focus, both of which enhance performance
Define a player's role in one simple challenge
Focus on processes; athletes can control processes
Identify the five most important processes that if performed well provide the best chance of the athlete delivering their role successfully
Encourage the athlete to evaluate their performance of these processes. Let them score themselves out of ten, but ensure to ask them why they are x score, and what can they do to become x+1
References:
Two Lengths of the Pool, Simon Hartley
Visit Simon Hartley's website, http://www.be-world-class.com