Change is inevitable and we need to accept that.

I have a motto: good coaches will have opportunities, but bad coaches will not. Find a way to replace the bad and keep the good. 

One message I discussed in How to Become a Strength Coach was the concept of your evolution as a coach. As a coach, you have one daily objective: to get better. When we are hired we are a version of ourselves that will pales when compared to our future selves. As strength coaches, we are constantly seeking means to improve. This is unique to us. I don’t think this is a hot take, but that is not the same as our counterparts in athletic departments. If you inventory an annual cycle of continuing education with books read, seminars attended, and mentorships we are running laps around the rest of the athletic department in terms of improvement. Which means your value and contribution improve with tenure. Inevitably that leads to an intersection of value and compensation. Most of the time strength coaches exceed their compensation with the value they bring.

I have another motto: you need to leave for two reasons – more money or more responsibility. 

The truth is as an employer and head coach I want people to leave. I want people to improve at an unprecedented rate in the industry. That eventually conflicts with my ability to compensate them based on their massively improved skill and knowledge. I am ok because that is what I want. I get best-in-class coaches delivering my program in such a way that garners them more opportunities and gets incredible results. I would much rather have a good coach for a short period than a bad coach for a long period. Being stuck in coaching purgatory is never good. Coaches becoming complacent and checking out cognitively and emotionally only leads to the inevitable point of no return. A marriage of convenience is never a good idea in a high-performance setting.

So how do you replace key people? You develop new key people. The approach you take with that person who is now leaving is preemptively developing new key people. Your job as a head coach or business owner is to constantly think of contingencies if someone were to leave. You have to think this way because of how good you are at developing coaches. Your coaches are coveted and rightly so. It is a net positive that you can help someone make more money or have more responsibility. But at the same time, they cannot sink the ship when they leave. Your true value as a manager is an exponential improvement as a program regardless of good coaches leaving.

People Process Program

Systems are more important than people. That may come off as harsh but in high stakes and high turnover environments, it is the truth. We have so many coaches who become territorial with responsibility or designations. They effectively gate-keep their process so they cannot be replaced. But if your message is that you are going to be so good that eventually you will have more opportunities, you have to eliminate silos. Taking a shared responsibility approach to jobs and responsibilities is the only way to survive. The strength of the system is that there is no drop-off in performance from one person to the next. Every iteration of that system is the byproduct of the people executing that system, so there needs to be exponential improvement from innovation and refinement. A person leaving means the next person has to be able to do the job better than their predecessor. You need systems to run the program you want. You will need to develop systems to developing people – that is your process.

I talk about this a lot in my Foundations Course. We have too many young coaches afraid to say what they want and we have too many veteran coaches afraid to lose someone. Young coaches could be uncertain, but my hunch is that it is much more systemic. The network effect is so strong in S&C. Which leads to a fear of alienating or upsetting someone in that network. Being transparent of true intentions can be matched with anxiety around being unfairly judged by someone in that network. The fear is that you say ‘I want ….”  and they end up hurting their long-term career prospects. Alternatively, it is hard to replace someone. If you are not forward-thinking about developing a farm system and cultivating your next coaches, hiring and onboarding someone is a nightmare. We end up with a marriage of convenience with employers fear-mongering and employees withholding their true intentions.

The solution is pretty simple. Everyone needs to be more comfortable with what they want. Having young coaches discuss their true aspirations, means you can hold them more accountable. We are all coaches and we do better when we have a clear vision of what we need to do. Asking someone what they want to accomplish in their career permits the boss to hold them to a higher standard. That creates rapid growth and development. That fosters a relationship of trust and understanding when we need to give feedback. It also protects the program, the business, and the system from having a vacuum effect when someone leaves. Your ecosystem can survive if your system is robust enough to handle evolution.

Good people leaving is inevitable. That is just the way of the world. An adage in business is centered around being nice to the talented because one day you might be working with them. I love my coaches, but I am not going to work for them. The stable is constantly stocked with new fresh talent of coaches. The reason I would have to work for someone else is because I lost that edge in developing new coaches. I ask them direct questions about what they want and why they want that. 100% of the time I follow up with you, you told me what you think I want to hear, and now tell me what you want and why you want that. Then I push them. I make them as good as humanly possible and keep the system going.