Why Being 'Intrigued' Is Essential For Coaches

When he was 6 years old, Cody Royle would frequently walk out to his family garden in Canberra to simulate an Australian Rules Football match.

But unlike most kids his age, Royle wasn’t merely imitating his favorite players. He was making the in-game decisions of various coaches and forcing himself to make split-second choices on strategies and substitutions.

“I was basically coaching myself, trying to figure out how each team was going to win,” he said.

The decades have passed, but Royle’s enthusiasm and larger curiosity around decision making have shifted from his hobby to his life’s work.

He coached Australian Rules Football professionally at just 23 and took over as the head coach of Team Canada two years later.

Royle now serves as a consultant to top professional coaches across a range of sports and has worked with leaders from Arsenal, the Toronto Maple Leafs and Stanford University, among others. He’s also penned three books around various coaching subjects.

“I have always been obsessed with how all the pieces fit together for certain teams at certain times, and trying to create those conditions more often,” he said. “It's easy to figure out when I'm the kid playing for both teams in the garden, but much more intricate to solve in real life.”

Best of 7 spoke to Royle about the four domains of a coach, current leadership trends he’s observed, and why it’s critical for coaches to recognize their own insecurities.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Best of 7: Cody, can you share your four coaching craft areas and how you came up with those?

The four areas are personal craft, organizational craft, locker room craft and game craft. Really, they’re just big buckets of responsibilities that a head coach has.

I think we have a really poor understanding of the different things that coaches do. So, really the craft areas came out of my own search for that, and not just the actual tasks, but how they all fit together. Something in your personal craft could have a knock-on effect to the organization or the locker room. Something that happens in a game could have a knock-on effect to your personal craft. It’s really the links between the crafts that's the key.

Is there one craft area that you find coaches tend to struggle with the most?

In terms of what coaches come to me for, there's two. There's the personal craft, their own search for who they are, what they stand for, their values, and really solidifying their personal standards and personal beliefs.

Then, the organizational craft is just one that has kind of gotten blown out of proportion over the last 20 years where organizations have gone up in numbers in terms of who has input in the on-court, on-field product. That needs management. The flow of information and the flow of responsibilities and the operations of the team just to get the players on the court, on the field is a big one now. But the reality is we're all learning all four of those crafts forever, and we never fully conquer them.

I listened to a presentation you gave recently, and you cited a really interesting study about how much players pick up on coaches’ moods and body language. Can you share a little of that?

That comes out of the coach burnout research. Athletes pick up on changes in tone and speed of your communication, and they also pick up on behavior, things like pacing up and down or looking agitated. They can tell when you've slept at the facility because your hair is a particular way.

Athletes who perceive their coaches as stressed view them as less effective and less competent. You think you're being bold and brave and doing what's necessary and leaving no stone unturned — and your athletes think you’re an idiot because they can tell you’re stressed, burned out and tired. They’re almost saying, “How dare you show up in this state and think you can effectively coach me?”

We don’t like to hear that, but I think it’s meaningful that it comes from athletes themselves.

You’ve written a lot about insecurity in coaching. How does a coach become more secure and confident beyond simply winning games?

I think about (Miami Heat Coach) Erik Spoelstra talking about how his impostor syndrome didn't go away until after LeBron James left Miami. It's such a crazy concept, isn't it? You spend all this time thinking, “Oh, if I can just get to the NBA.” Then, it's, “If I can just get a good team.” Then, you become the head coach of this team stacked with superstars, and you still don’t feel like you belonged until after LeBron left.

What Pete Carroll talks about is trying to figure out who you are. His famous words in his press conference when he was leaving Seattle were, “The heart of everything is figuring out who you are.” The unfortunate truth to that is that’s always changing. But how a coach becomes more comfortable is knowing they’re on a lifelong search, and they’re going to be a different person at a different time. The challenge is against yourself, and you’re always learning about yourself.

Rather than being secure, I think it’s about being intrigued. This is probably the best application of the self-reflection wave we’ve been on. It’s the ability to reflect on your behavior or how you’re feeling or what you’ve said or a response to a situation and say, “I wonder why I responded like that. I wonder why I said that. Let me think about what I’m going through. What was the environment? Did I sleep well? Did this person agitate me? Was it something at home?”

It’s being intrigued about why certain things happen. You have to understand that you are part of it, but you’re also completely tethered to your environment. There’s going to be things in the environment you interact with that are responsible for your behavior. You start to see patterns, and that’s where you become interested.

Several good thoughts there. Can you share your duct tape story?

That’s from a mentor named Cameron Schwab. He’s been a CEO of three teams in the AFL, and his dad was a famous administrator. He made a comment to me one day in which he said, “You think these successful teams have all of their ducks in a row, have this perfect culture, and are living their values. But when you peek behind the curtain of successful teams, what you realize is they’re just held together by better duct tape.”

What he was saying is everyone is taped together in some respect. The reality is it’s really flimsy when you really peer behind it. The teams we're in awe of have problems, too. It's rare to see genuinely high-performing organizations without politics or backstabbing or unrest or burnout. As competitors, that poses some interesting opportunities about how we can pick away at our opponent's duct tape and start to turn the tide in our favor. Even strong duct tape comes apart eventually.

What’s the toughest decision you’ve had to make in your career and how did you navigate it?

The toughest decisions I’ve made have really been the ends of things. I stopped playing at 23 to get into coaching. That had been my entire identity. The decision when you’re that young and impressionable and don’t really know much about the world — trading that in for something else.

Similarly, leaving team Canada as a coach. The end of something has an identity piece to it. What am I going to do next? Then there’s a passion piece. But I’ve chosen to live my life by trying to take action. I try not to sit and wonder about what’s going to happen if I decide to go and coach coaches. I’ve done the thing instead of spending too long thinking about it. Go down the path. You have a different perspective once you’re further down. New paths unfold, and that’s how I’ve tried to conceptually think about my life. When I face big decisions, take action.

What’s one trend you’re seeing in coaching these days you’re pessimistic about and what’s one thing that excites you?

What concerns me is the plummeting longevity of coaching tenure. I think it’s driving a short-termism, which counteracts what I’m excited about. Coaches get criticized for creating fear cultures within their teams, but we also need to acknowledge that coaches exist within a fear culture that is fed by owners who are, in some cases, not even a person but an entity or business or private equity firm. Journalists can decide whether to pile on a particular coach, and if there’s nothing to do or talk about, it goes back to the hot seat. You don’t even need to be coaching poorly or have lost the locker room. I’m really pessimistic about that and don’t know where it ends.

What excites me is we’re capable of so much more. I don’t think we’re even going at a quarter steam right now. I see so many opportunities for coaching to go three, four, five gears higher than we’re currently at. That’s not to say good work hasn’t been done.

But I think we’re capable of more.

What I learned…

Royle alluded to the hedonic treadmill for coaches, who, at times, set arbitrary goals for their careers, only to reach these and discover they still want more. His larger point about overcoming that mindset with curiosity and a willingness to acknowledge what we don’t know was well conceived.

True security doesn’t come purely from what the scoreboard says on the last day of the season or some other fleeting form of external validation. Instead, Royle believes it requires a deeper self-awareness and understanding that can only be cultivated through initial curiosity, continuous learning and practical application of knowledge.

If we’re second-guessing ourselves in some respect, that may not be a bad thing. It might actually mean we have the self-awareness required to grow and do it better the next time.