Coaching as a Micro-political Activity: Reflections and Strategies

You Are Required To Critically Reflect On Your Practical Coaching Experiences, Giving Specific Consideration Towards ‘How’ And ‘Why’ You Were Required To Engage In a Variety Of Proactive And Reactive Micropolitical Actions In Order To Achieve Your Desired Goals. ?

Introduce The Portfolio Task: o Brief Background Information (e.g. Introduction To Coaching As a Micropolitical Activity). o Clear Statement Of The Aim Of The Paper. o Outline How The Paper Is Structured. ?

Outline The Goals Or Outcomes That You Were Trying To Achieve Through Your Coaching Practice And Explain Why You Wanted To Achieve These Goals. ?

Explain Who The Key Individuals Were Who Could Influence Your Ability To Achieve/Realise Your Desired Goals. ?

Describe And Discuss The Different Strategies That You Employed In An Effort To Access Required Resources And Ensure These Individuals Bought Into Your Coaching Programme (What Did You Do?

How Did You It? Why Did You Do It? What Did You Avoid Doing?

Micro-politics is a concept particularly used in organizational theories. It mainly involves the activities performed within the organization for acquisition, development, and usage of the power to achieve the desired outcome for the organization (Ives et al. 2016). Micro-politics can be combined with education, organization, and also with education also. According to the researches, politics is considered as an integral part of a coach’s repertoire (Potrac, Nelson and O’Gorman 2016). The reason behind this, is that the effectiveness of the coach depends not only on the record of wins and losses but also on the favorability of an individual to attain support of related power brokers (including athletes, coaches and the founders).

Researchers also disclosed that, politics is an integral part of universal and pervasive characteristics of the human behavior. It refers that, the existence of politics can be observed in any activity between two persons involved in some collective activity (Gibson and Groom 2019). Recently studies have mentioned the relationship of micro-politics with the social activity of coaching. This is inevitable for those activities where change is a constant thing.

This particular study aims to investigate about the truthfulness of the statement – coaching as a micro-political activity. This study aims to discuss about a practical instance of a coaching practice and its relation to the micro-political activities.

After the brief introduction about micro-politics and its field of use, the paper clearly states the aim or the core idea behind this study. It will provide an outline of the desired outcome a coach wishes after reaching the final stage of the aspired goal. It will explain about the key individuals and their roles to influence the coach’s ability to become successful. The study will further demonstrate the strategies a coach must employ for the activities of sports coaching. It will reflect on the contemporary issues attached with the activities of coaching. The study will provide literature analysis related to the knowledge of a coach. Finally, it will provide a reflection on an application of coaching theory into practice.

Aim of The Study

Sports is a domain where weather and geographical location plays an important role. For example, running is a sport where the athletes comes from the higher lands performs better than the athletes come from the plains. The reason is they are trained enough to perform in comparatively more adverse situation in terms to the athletes from the plain (Garvey et al. 2017). The most important issue in the sports coaching is the deficiency of proper professional trainer or coaches. The sports federation only seeks the retired athletes to train the new or fresh athletes. Despite this, sports coaching is often criticized as it lack the efficiency to properly nurture the new athletes and provide them enough knowledge about the technical skills related to the domain of sports (Hunt 2016). The technical skills refers to development of the player, planning the program, preparation and technique of the sports. Negligence in these areas often results into poor performance by the athletes and decreasing motivation or interest from the genre of sports. As per the opening section of the paper, the most important issue of sports coaching is corruption. The management is involved in this type of issue that includes the areas such as funds receiving from the sponsors. This is one of the reasons to lower the morality of the athletes and for the entire genre of sports. One of the reasons that gives birth to corruption is the lack of employment opportunity in the field of coaching. Other important issues observed in the sports coaching are harassments and discrimination from the coaches for the athletes. These are the ethical challenges attributed with the field of sports (Cushion and Townsend 2019). This involves favorability by the coach for any particular gender where the other members of the athlete groups feel discriminated. Another issue that comes under the same list is the bleach of confidentiality. It refers to the situation where the trainer fails to protect any particular trainee’s personal record.

The research about sports and coaching issues has been initiated near about the year of 1937. There were various empirical knowledge published during the year of 1999 by different scholars. By this time, the researchers formed various definition of the term coach and coaching. Combining the existing definition of a coach it can be said that the responsibility of an ideal coach is to indulge into activities of repackaging or reframing the techniques incorporating the other field of studies including counselling, psychology, and consulting (Stout-Rostron 2017). However, the relation of counselling with the activities of coaching has been limited by several studies. The other responsibilities of a coach includes building formal contracts, building relation with the team members, assessing the potentiality of every athletes, and self-assessment by the means of collecting feedback from the athletes (Paquette et al.  2014). The primary responsibility of a coach is to define the goal and implement the activities to achieve the targeted goal. There are various studies available on the subject of identification of crucial attributes of an effective coach. These attributes includes self-awareness, fundamental coaching competency, and knowledge of ethics and related terms. As an additional attribute the studies also mentioned about the management skill of coaching relationship (Bailey, Cope and Pearce 2013). Underpinning the knowledge of the coach also require to relate the factors that impacts upon the individual and the entire organization. Hence, as a general definition of coaching it can be said that coaching is an adult learning strategy generally built on the capacity to enhance the available abilities and development of new skills for a deeper acquisition of knowledge for proper implementation in the future activities (Rynne and Mallett 2014). Coaching is an ongoing process to critically help the learners to learn new skills and enhance the acquired ones.

Structure

According to the psychological theory there are four approaches that can influence the activities of a coach. The four forces are namely Freudian, Humanistic, Behavioral, and transpersonal approaches. To mention such a personality to infuse the psychological forces with coaching the name Williams James is worth mentioning. James focuses on the functions of brain with the perception of space, will, attention, psychic faculties, and habit. As a coach, a personal preference provided on the humanistic theory of coaching to the team members. Hence, some strategies are followed to establish effective training for the team members. Firstly, an initiative to know the level of passion for the sports of every individual member of the team. For the next step, it is important to introduce the strategy of whole-part method. In-depth knowledge of fundamentals provides an advantage as the team members are monitoring a psychological checklist for acquiring the skills properly. The main thing avoided in the coaching procedure is to assess the member and adopting self-assessment to enhance the potentiality of the trainer.

Conclusion

As a conclusion it can be said that, the sports coaching and its relation with micro-politics is a common thing. Politics is an integral part of the field of sports. Many group of researchers considers the inclusion of politics in the field of sports as a challenge that affects the entire domain and the life of the athletes. However, there are ample amount of strategies to improve the quality of training and avoid the tagged limitations of sports coaching. Humanistic approach is the best suited attitude for better management of any sports training or coaching.

References

Bailey, R., Cope, E.J. and Pearce, G., 2013. Why do children take part in, and remain involved in sport? A literature review and discussion of implications for sports coaches. International Journal of Coaching Science, 7(1).

Cushion, C.J. and Townsend, R.C., 2019. Technology-enhanced learning in coaching: A review of literature. Educational Review, 71(5), pp.631-649.

Garvey, R., Garvey, B., Stokes, P. and Megginson, D., 2017. Coaching and mentoring: Theory and practice. Sage.

Gibson, L. and Groom, R., 2019. The micro-politics of organisational change in professional youth football: Towards an understanding of “actions, strategies and professional interests”. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 14(1), pp.3-14.

Hunt, C.S., 2016. Getting to the heart of the matter: Discursive negotiations of emotions within literacy coaching interactions. Teaching and teacher education, 60, pp.331-343.

Ives, B., Gale, L., Nelson, L. and Potrac, P., 2016. Enacting youth sport policy: Towards a micro-political and emotional understanding of community sports coaching work. In Routledge handbook of youth sport (pp. 589-600). Routledge.

Paquette, K.J., Hussain, A., Trudel, P. and Camiré, M., 2014. A sport federation’s attempt to restructure a coach education program using constructivist principles. International Sport Coaching Journal, 1(2), pp.75-85.

Potrac, P., Nelson, L. and O’Gorman, J., 2016. Exploring the everyday realities of grass-roots football coaching: towards a relational perspective. Soccer & Society, 17(6), pp.910-925.

Rynne, S.B. and Mallett, C.J., 2014. Coaches’ learning and sustainability in high performance sport. Reflective Practice, 15(1), pp.12-26.

Stout-Rostron, S., 2017. Working with diversity in coaching. The Sage handbook of coaching, pp.486-504.