FootyFix: Will North answer the call?
Rohan Connolly previews all the footy action ahead of round 13 in the AFL.
PT5M43S 620 349The media love a hero and a villain, and no more so than in the AFL. How often when a team is performing extremely poorly or extremely well do we hear praise or criticism concentrated on the captain or coach? Sometimes this is warranted. Other times, it speaks more about the unwillingness of the commentator to investigate the actual problems, or a lack of understanding about the complexity of modern day football clubs and just how many critical moving parts are needed to create successful environments.
I suspect there was a time in the AFL/VFL when a handful of top level senior players and a gun coach could get you close to success on field. Not so today. Modern day footy departments have around 80 full-time staff.
Incompetent employees are energy vacuums who suck the life out of their colleagues. The quicker they're out of the organisation, the better.
They're all important, but not equally so. What is vital to get right in the footy department are the key positions of influence.
Chris Judd: It's too simplistic to blame the coach at under-performing clubs. Photo: Scott McNaughton/The Weekly Review
The key roles in a football department are senior coach, captain, football manager, list manager, head of development, head of fitness and head of player welfare. If I were running an underperforming club, the first step I'd take would be to analyse whether any of those seven people had a different set of values to the club's. To put this in layman's terms, are any of them dickheads? If any are, even if they are elite performers, plans should be made to show them the door as soon as it's appropriate.
Of the rest, I'd determine whether their level of performance is either incompetent, satisfactory, competent or elite. To be a premiership side, all seven must be competent or better. Not all of the people filling these positions will begin this way. Should any be incompetent, I'd make plans for them to join those with a value misalignment, buy them a gold watch (or a certificate of appreciation if you're one of the Queensland clubs under financial duress!) and thank them for the memories.
Incompetent employees are energy vacuums who suck the life out of their colleagues. The quicker they're out of the organisation, the better. That leaves you potentially with some new employees. But if your hiring process has been thorough, you should end up with seven people performing at a satisfactory level or better.
Next, there needs to be a plan to move everyone up a category, or in the case of elite performers to the top end of their category. I'd give this process 12 months, but for the more complex position of coach, 2-3 years. When a young player is drafted, he gets senior players on which to model his behaviour, development coaches, assistant coaches, fitness staff and the senior coach, who all look at ways to improve his performance.
But what assistance is built in for the senior coach, recruited into a position of intense scrutiny and pressure, often at the ripe old age of mid-30s? Some clubs send their coaches off to do courses at Harvard, while others hire management consultants to assist. Some hire senior assistant coaches or directors of coaching, but some don't have structured professional development for their coaches at all.
I think the most effective professional development measures for a senior coach should be done with contractors or organisations separate from the club and who don't report on the coach's progress to the club's administration.
This allows the coach to be honest and demonstrate weakness, knowing it won't be held against him at a later stage.
If, after two or three years, the senior coach isn't deemed to be in the competent or better category (or at least moving rapidly towards it), he should be managed out. For the other key people, 12 months should be enough.
A clear development strategy for those seven main people, along with some measurable performance indicators, makes the firing process so much easier for club management and boards, because the club knows they have tried their very best to help the coach and his principal support staff.
It is important to remember that a senior coach in his mid-30s is just as inexperienced as an 18-year-old player in the roles both perform, something the soap opera of the AFL media rarely take into consideration.
In time, I think the other keys, particularly list managers, head of fitness and football managers, will become a bigger part of that soap opera and we'll see more of them pop up in the reporting of their clubs. This will, in turn, lead to wider understanding that the days of a single knight riding in on a white horse to save the day are gone – if they ever really existed.
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