Connectivity
When talking to athletes about leadership within their team, I often talk in terms of tools in their toolbox. The first is connectivity.
Connectivity is the relationship between you and the other people on the team. As you can imagine, the strength of connectivity between you and different teammates varies to some degree. You may have a teammate who is as close as a sibling and there may be teammates where all you know is there name.
The key to making connectivity a powerful tool is to have at least a moderate level of connectivity with everyone on the team. If you could take a list of everyone on your team and rank your connectivity with each of them with a 1-10 score (a 10 being besty level and a 1 being you know their name only) what would it look like?
Effective leaders would have a distribution of scores for each person on the team between 4 and 10. That is they have a “beyond name recognition” level of connectivity with everyone on the team. Everyone is not equal. That’s not realistic, but everyone is at least at that base level.
Why is this important? Because people don’t follow leaders they don’t know or leaders that don’t know them. Why would they? Why would they think you have any interest in them if you barely know them, if at all? They won’t.
Another reason this is important is that it breaks perceptions of you being part of a clique or subgroup. Cliques are killers when it comes to team culture. It portrays a feeling of us and them, hierarchies, and exclusion. All team wreckers. You don’t have to love everyone on your team, but a a leader, you need to have some level of connectivity.
Exercise: Go for it…List out everyone on your team or training group and score your relationship level with them on how close you are. If you have teammates at a 1, 2, or 3, create some time before or after practice to chat with them a bit. Get to know them.