Anyone in a high-stress job knows the feeling: You’re streaking toward a major deadline and you’re doing your best to keep your team from falling apart. They’re looking to you for guidance; you’re resisting the urge to hurl your computer against the wall.
Business leaders know performing during stressful periods is challenging at the best of times. But imagine having to make those decisions in front of a camera and under the microscope of Toronto’s hockey-mad media. That’s exactly what Sheldon Keefe, NHL coach, has to do every day. We recently sat down with Keefe, who shared his thoughts on what makes a great leader and how to focus a team on a common goal.
While snarling at refs and getting a little red in the face now and then can be part of a coach’s, and their players’, job description, the best thing Keefe can do as a coach in those high-pressure moments is instill a sense of hope in his players, he said.
“You have to give the players a reason to believe that you can help them perform.”
Tailoring feedback
Knowing how different players respond to feedback is also important. Approaches that work with one team member can be less effective with others. Keefe points to his relationship with one team’s star players, as an example. Helping him excel was an early task for Keefe. Having coached this player in the minors, Keefe knew he was used to being challenged – but you have to strike a balance.
“You can be pushing and challenging someone, sometimes in an aggressive way, but then you have to level out the next day,” he noted. “We’re both trying to come to the right place, which is to have him maximize his potential.” Keefe says maintaining respect and trust helps to preserve a collegial relationship off the ice.
Further, Keefe appreciates he can’t take the same approach or deliver news to other players in the same manner. He recalled a time when he was working with a player who was struggling in the minors. Rather than come down hard on the player every time something went wrong, Keefe said he would randomly pull the player aside and show him a video of the five or six things he liked. “I would call them celebrations,” he said. “His confidence grew and I learned a lot about myself, my leadership style and how I’ve worked with him.”
The other part of leadership is recognizing how much your demeanour can affect how others perform. Elliotte Friedman, a hockey analyst with Sportsnet who moderated the conversation with Keefe, recalled a story he worked on earlier in his career about a first-time coach that came in mid-season to turn around an underperforming NHL team and guide them to the playoffs. When Friedman asked some of the players what had changed between the current and previous coach, he was told by five different players that the first thing the coach would say when he saw them would be ‘Good morning’ or ‘How are you doing?’ Sometimes coaches will look down on you, or they’re mad, or they just look away, but with the new coach the players said he always greeted them with a smile. “That was huge,” they told Friedman.
Dealing with failure
When something goes wrong at work, it can feel like the spotlight is on and everyone’s scrutinizing every decision. Keefe’s advice to those in that situation? Be honest. “You have to be very direct about where you went wrong and how you’re going to be better,” he said.
Maintaining optimism in the locker room can be challenging at times, but sometimes the best way to do that is just to try, noted Keefe. “Whether it’s before practice or after practice, whether it’s on the bench or in the hallway, I try to have those proactive conversations, not just wait for the slip-up to remind them,” he said.
“I’ve always tried to lead this way, and I’ve tried to empower my assistant coaches to be on top of that. And most importantly, we’re trying to get the players themselves to recognize the positives in each other because, ultimately, the players want the approval of each other more so than me.”
Trust in yourself
Whether it’s opinion from fans or the media, or stat sheets and videos, Keefe has no shortage of information thrust in his direction to help him make decisions. Like anyone in a leadership role, there’s often more information than he can digest.
For Keefe, the art of coaching or leadership is being able to take in all the information available to you and pair that with your instincts, so you’re always making an informed decision. “Sometimes, especially in sports, you might make a decision that is completely counter to what all the other information might be telling you because of how you feel, because of your experience, because of what you know of your athletes, because of what you might know of the opposition, because of what you know in a moment of the game, or how the game is being officiated.”
Ultimately, whether in business or sports, you have to be willing to live with the results of your decisions. “You want to build a collaborative environment that takes in information, ideas, opinions of others, data science – all of these things – but be decisive enough to make the decision at the right time.”
