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Leadership Communication

December 3, 2013

“We’ve got the weather,” the man said. And for years, my wife and I have wondered what he meant.

We had been walking in Dublin, Ireland and paused to photograph the huge wooden doors of an aging church building, when an elderly man on the sidewalk greeted us with those few words.

Did he mean the weather was bad because it was raining? Or, as we think more likely, was he saying the weather was good because it was a mild day with a gentle breeze and only a light rain?

My wife and I still recall that day in Dublin, that brief encounter, whenever we hear people make statements that could be interpreted in exactly opposite ways.

Speakers often say one thing and mean another, sometimes intentionally, sometimes innocently. Listeners often misinterpret what was stated because they had something different on their minds or expected something different to be said.

All of this and more adds to the difficulty of communicating effectively, whether between two people or within a team or organization.

Leadership communication attempts to minimize these misunderstandings; and an effective tactic for doing so is to have listeners restate what they believe they heard the leader say.

Communicating messages clearly and repetitiously is a leadership essential; but so is providing opportunities for others to repeat those messages. This leads not only to more precise communication, but also to more pervasive and powerful messages.

High-Performing Programs

July 10, 2018

(This blog first appeared on MHSAA.com June 28, 2011, and was printed in the September/October 2006 MHSAA Bulletin, and in Lasting Impressions, which appears in the MHSAA's online Library.)

A study of 10 academically-oriented after-school programs in New York City funded by the After-School Corporation may provide some unintended guidance for interscholastic athletic programs.

Prepared in November 2005 by Policy Studies Associates, Inc. for the After-School Corporation and Southwest Educational Development Laboratory with support from the U.S. Department of Education, the report “Shared Features of High Performing After-School Programs” identifies the following characteristics of high performing after-school programs:

  • A broad array of enrichment opportunities. 
  • Opportunities for skill building and mastery. 
  • Intentional relationship building. 
  • A strong, experienced leader/manager supported by a trained and supervised staff. 
  • The administrative, fiscal and professional development support of the sponsoring organization.

While competitive junior high/middle school and high school sports were not the subject of this study, here’s what I think these findings could mean for school sports:

  • Interscholastic athletic programs should provide a wide variety of opportunities appealing to a diverse group of students.

  • Interscholastic athletic programs should provide competitive opportunities for the highly skilled as well as learning opportunities for the less skilled so they too might progress to higher levels of competency, or just enjoy the fun, friends and fitness of school sports.

  • Teamwork, sportsmanship and leadership should be outcomes as intentional as development of skills of the sport and strategies of contests.

  • A full-time athletic administrator is essential, and it is imperative this person have authority to train and supervise staff and hold them accountable for performance consistent with the best practices of educational athletics.

  • School boards and their administrators must provide sound policies and procedures, adequate financial support and opportunities for continuing education for the athletic director and every coach.

All in all, a pretty good blueprint for school sports in Michigan.