If you have ever read the book, Legacy, you’ll have read a chapter entitled “Leave the Jersey Better Than You Found It.” In that chapter is a poignant line: “plant seeds for trees that you will never see grow.”
This is an important chapter to dive into with all of our staff, in that we need to establish a culture of collaboration with everyone on staff. This, however, may not be intuitive. In fact, it may feel contrary to their beliefs. There will always be a spectrum of knowledge and abilities with everyone and every task required in a given day. There may be a specialist on staff that focuses only on: Return to Play, Speed Development, Olympic Lifting, Energy System Development, Regeneration, Programming, Coaching Education, etc. That person working with a specific focus will most certainly need help. What our staff or any staff may not appreciate is that they may perceive this as training their replacement.
This is where it gets interesting. Training your replacement is not the most comfortable conversation to have. Establishing that there is a finite amount of time someone will be responsible for a particular aspect of a job is not the easiest thing to comprehend. It could certainly be spun in a way that is negative, in that you will be pushed out and replaced with a younger and cheaper version. The dynamic of needing help but feeling insecure that someone will gain an edge on you is a constant challenge in the work environment.
A good staff has healthy competitiveness. It stems from trying to improve each and every day. There is a certain sense of accomplishment when someone is excelling in their domain relative to their peers. This is the foundation of why training your replacement is a good thing and demonstrates confidence in your abilities. When you, as the resident expert, can train someone to do your job, you demonstrate a sense of confidence that frees you to do other things. You are more available to perform higher level tasks. This is what managers have to do to survive. The ability to train others to do your job is the essence of leadership. If you cannot effectively explain what you do, how can you lead others to do it?
The biggest reason behind not being comfortable with training your replacement is comfort. As we evolve in our professional careers, we develop a comfort level with executing a job day in and day out. The process of detailing what you do each day becomes a burden that is viewed as ‘extra’ work, and you can easily resent it. We also become protective of that and do not want to give it up.
We all got into coaching because we are competitive and enjoy the proverbial climb. Viewing someone as a threat means you have lost that edge and are focused solely on protecting your domain. There are absolutely things you should fight to preserve, such as avoiding inefficiencies in the workplace. Training and teaching others should not be one of them.
If you have ever made the leap from D3 or High School S&C 10+ Team Roster to a Power Five 1 Team Roster, you will know this conversation. ‘What are you going to do with all your free time?” You end your first year there and you begin to inventory if you actually worked less only to come to find out you actually worked more. The difference in time is that you find more things to do. You fill your day with more areas for which you can provide assistance.
The idea of training someone to do your job enables you to do other jobs. Working with one team or 10 teams is all about maximizing your time day with your teams. Training your counterparts is not about committing to the university or professional team’s future without you. It is instead investing in yourself so you can do other jobs that will require someone who can train and lead others effectively.
The All Blacks understood that a team’s Legacy is not about one person or one team. Teams or a staff are a collective of countless people and an over undetermined number of years. Your staff you work with is not going to be pulled up by one person’s knowledge in one particular area. They are a product of collective knowledge over a large period of time. Training your replacement is demonstrating that whatever is good about a staff can be reproduced and replicated. The ones that can do that can move up to higher echelons professionally.