Coaching to be a Better Leader

Recently my 6-year-old son started wrestling for our school club team. He has been involved in a few sports as we are trying to introduce him to as many as possible while he is young. He is moving towards liking a few of them and is asking for exposure to more. This has been great but I have a hard time staying out of the coaching realm. I played and coached Men's Rugby for a few years and enjoy transferring my skills to other players. I never wrestled, I played football, ran track, and I boxed until I started playing Rugby. My wife would like me to be more involved in my son's sports, but the timing has always been difficult.

In 2018 I have made the move to be an Entrepreneur starting and working fulltime on a few ventures at the same time. My business partners and I started www.RTBlimited.com a Training and Business consultancy company last year, and this year another friend approached me about starting www.DermRT.com a radiation therapy solution for skin cancer. I also help my mother with her business Magnolia House Honey This has given me a greater appreciation of time-management skills which I feel like I have gained over the last few years. It has also given me more time to spend with my son as he took on wrestling. Wrestling has a lot of the same body position and control as Rugby so it was difficult for me to stay on the sideline. Needless to say, I did get involved early and helped coach my son and his friends this season. They did great but I also learned a great deal about leading and coaching.

As a leader, it is important to always coach your team to be better than you are or to transfer the info you have to them so they can evolve as members of your team. Being involved with my son's team help reinforce that perspective as we learned the basics of wrestling and I added what I learned to from rugby to help them grow. It also showed me that when coaching whether as a technical expert or seasoned professional it's important to teach or coach your team like its the first time they are hearing this info and to break it down to simple terms and grow onto it as they become more proficient.

The overall message here is to be a better leader it's important to coach and teach on a regular basis. This helps you with not only operational efficiency as you grow and it gives you the ability to set up a decentralized command structure within your team. You are creating the next set of leaders on your team, not the replacement for your job. This has been reinforced in an HBR article stating that delegation and leading require coaching as well.

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