Tony Dungy’s 7-Es of Coaching and Leadership
In one of my favorite books, The Mentor Leader by Tony Dungy, Dungy provides a simple formula for effective coaching and leadership. Dungy states:
Engage, educate, equip, encourage, empower, energize, and elevate. Those are the methods for maximizing the potential of any individual, team, organization, or institution for ultimate success and significance.
1. Engage
Engagement starts when coaches and leaders go beyond expectations. The coach doesn’t just do what it takes to develop a winning team, the coach also engages his team to develop winners in life. This means providing mentorship year around, even in the off-season and for non-team related activities.
2. Educate
Great coaches and leaders develop great coaches and leaders. In sports, this is called a coaching tree. All great coaches and leaders have one. This is because they take the time to teach the “why” behind what they do and educate those that follow their lead. It’s always easier to follow when you understand the why behind the methods, and that why makes sense.
3. Equip
A big part of coaching and leadership is equipping those who follow you with the tools they need for success. This includes both the physical and mental tools for injury prevention, nutrition, goal setting, resilience, time management, and anxiety management.
4. Encourage
It’s one thing to point out all the things you are doing wrong, it’s another thing to provide actionable feedback that encourages you to get better. The latter is what great coaches and leaders routinely do.
This doesn’t mean they sugarcoat the feedback. Instead, feedback is filtered through the lens of motivating progress. What’s more, every person has different buttons that motivate them. Great coaches recognize these unique buttons and know how and when to press those buttons to encourage.
5. Empower
To empower requires coaches and leaders to not be control freaks. This means asking for, being open to, and adjusting course based on feedback from the team. In addition, delegating important tasks to team captains empowers them to grow in their ability to deal with more difficult challenges.
6. Energize
Great coaches and leaders know how to energize their team in a way that makes them feel they can take on the world. Coaches and leaders set the tone for the energy level of their teams by:
- Celebrating both the minor and major wins
- Gamifying otherwise boring activities
- Showing creativity in how they challenge the status quo, and
- Fostering a culture of gratitude
7. Elevate
Average coaches and leaders know how to work with great teams. Great coaches and leaders know how to work with average teams and make them great. They do this by:
- Holding everyone accountable for the team’s performance and discouraging the “me-first” mentality
- Focusing on developing strengths, and managing weaknesses
- Setting high expectations, along with implementing a process to realistically achieve those high expectations
- Measuring progress and using visual tools to report those measurements out to the team, and
- Getting buy-in from the team by using methods to get everyone to accept ownership in the process and outcome
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