Leadership Is A Craft

The best aren’t getting better on their own, they’re getting better because they are being coached.

Leadership Has Four Crafts Areas

We coach our leadership clients that contemporary leaders must master four key areas or crafts. These crafts are essential for becoming an effective and efficient team leader:

🏬 Organisational Craft

🗣️ Personal Craft

🤝🏼 Team Craft

♟️ Game Craft

What makes leadership so challenging is that the four key crafts are interdependent and require a perfect balance. A problem within your team might arise from issues in your organisation and their processes, or cultural problem, and a personal intervention could disrupt the team's equilibrium if not handled correctly.

Although each domain may vary in importance and priority based on the team's condition or the season's stage, they are never dormant. Each area is equally complex to master, continuously evolving, and fraught with potential pitfalls.

Below I’ve broken it down in a little more detail around the four craft areas:

Organisational Craft

Think of this as your ability to navigate the administrative areas of running a team, such as:

Your 'office work' encompasses more than just completing tasks; it also involves navigating the organisational dynamics inherent in any human enterprise. Many organisations undermine themselves before their team members even step onto the field.

Organisational craft is an area where most leaders struggle, as it is often the most detached from the activities that initially earned them their leadership roles, whether as department heads or head coaches. Additionally, this skill set cannot be practiced in advance—it's a sink or swim scenario.

Personal Craft

Your toughest opponent is yourself. So think of this as scouting yourself just like you would scout a competitor. You’re searching to find out everything you can about yourself, every tiny detail in order to recognise patterns that can guide your future success and stop you before situations get out of hand.

Personal craft is the area that has seen the most development in the last decade, but is still one area most leaders give the least attention to, and it always baffles me as to why. It’s possibly the most important. It’s the one that has the highest potential for continued growth over the next decade. Unlocking yourself is a worthwhile pursuit because in copycat leagues with largely commoditised tactics, analytics, and preparation techniques, you are your team's greatest source of unique competitive advantage.

As NFL head coach Pete Carroll reminded us in his farewell press conference he said:

"To me, the essence of being as good as you can be
is to figure out who you are."

Team Craft 

Think of this as how you manage your team, and keep them on track as they progress through the different stages of the lifecycle.

The most fascinating of the crafts, it is also the most volatile. It is an exercise in trying to understand why a certain group can do certain things, and other groups can't. While it can often feel like herding cats, your locker room mastery is the bedrock upon which sustained success is built.

Game Craft 

Think of this as how you conceptualise and teach the game that you’re playing.

The most exciting and heartbreaking of the crafts. Most leaders are elite in their game craft, but in my opinion the greatest opportunity for continued development is refinement.

Despite the increased complexity of tactical systems in modern sport, it is the growth in staff sizes that has made it toughest to master game craft. The fragmentation of performance makes depth of knowledge difficult, and the need to 'pull it all together' into a cohesive effort adds layers of dynamism that are still relatively new. In another example of lost craft, I’ve observed a growing number of coaches deferring to practice design in order to solve problems after the fact, rather than in-game interventions. We must continue to develop our coach's eye and show bravery to make tough decisions that change the game.

Coaches Notes:

1. In a cruel irony, your excellence in one craft area is often what gets you hired as a head coach. It gives you a false sense of security. What got you here won’t get you there.

2. Being skilled in one or two of the craft domains still leaves you deficient overall. You must diligently pursue development in all four craft areas in order to be considered a master.

3. Beware the head coach who thinks they’ve figured out all of these areas. That is someone who is destined to fail.

4. Superior craftsmanship is about how all four craft areas fit together, so consider the links between the domains.

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