Using profiling to help improve your coaching

“Coaching is about interactions”

Dave Doran s4pcoaching

Ideally, coaching is about long term relationships where all parties work together with the same goal in mind, it is athlete centred rather than coach driven. 

Unfortunately, I have seen far too often that sport is funding driven and the athlete is passed around from coach to coach to meet the demands of the NGB.

Petty administrators hide behind emails and excel spreadsheets and forget that they are there to help remove barriers.

Here at Excelsior, we work hard at creating long term, meaningful relationships with other coaches and athletes alike.

Duncan has recently been looking to sharpen his coaching practice under the guidance of an old (some might say very old) University colleague of mine: Dave Doran. 

Here are some of his thoughts and lessons.

Does your personality influence your coaching style?

 We all have different coaching styles & personalities, these can influence how we progress as a coach and how we interact with others. 

When coaching do you find you work better with some athletes than others?

Over the past couple of years coaching, there have been some athletes with whom I get on well  and others with whom I have sometimes struggled to form a relationship,

As coaches you then have to decide whether you can build the relationship or if the athlete is better suited to a different style of coach.

Working with teams you are going to get all types of personality so you need to be adaptable in your approach (like this chameleon).

We hear about this in football a lot, managers clashing with players sometimes to the point that the manager gets sacked or the players leave a club. If both had been more adaptable then they may have been able to build a relationship even if only for the benefit of the team. 

Can we improve our adaptability and skills at building relationships? 

Dave Doran presented a workshop titled “Profiling for improved coaching performance” over the summer which can help coaches understand more about themselves and their relationships. 

Dave has over 30 years working within the police, the last 3 as a performance coach. He has been a level 5 coach at rugby league and studied Sports coaching for his Masters, so has plenty of experience and knowledge in performance coaching.

Personal Profile Analysis uses the DISC profiling system, it’s based on our perceptions of how we work in situations, and works out general characteristics, motivators and what values you can take to an organisation.

It uses four personality traits:
The profile tells you how strong the four traits are when you are at work, under pressure and your self image. This shows how you work/communicate and prefer to be communicated with. For example; 

1. If you are high dominance and are working with someone high in compliance, your direct coaching may not give the compliant athlete all the details they would like.
2. If you have 2 athletes, Athlete 1 high steadiness and Athlete 2 high dominance, you will need to be more methodical in your approach with athlete 1, but direct and decisive with athlete 2.

If you read the statements for each you will probably see ones that match you. 

How I have used the profiling to help me

I have been working with a hockey team for the last 2 seasons now and started off being more of an influencer and steady. This season I wanted to move forward from last and became more dominant and compliant, with the athletes I have this has failed and how we have played has shown this. 

By looking at how my coaching style has changed I can see what worked before and what iis failing now. I am now trying to get the right balance between all 4 that is appropriate for the team. 

Duncan Buckmaster 

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Coach development  Communication in coaching