Avoid "we" statements

In a previous article, I briefly mentioned avoiding “we” statements.

4. Avoid "we" statements

I’m going to expand more on this in a future article, but the short version is that “we” statements can be vague (see the next item) or passive-aggressive if not used carefully.

Do “we” need to serve better, or is it one person that missed a couple critical serves?

This topic has come up a few times in discussion with other coaches, so I’ll expand a bit more on that now. There’s actually two pitfalls that occur with We Statements, and they are distinct, so let me take each one in turn.

See The Trees, Not The Forest

Team statistics are important, I regularly devote full posts to figuring out the most important metrics for your team.

But you still need to understand that your team statistics are that way because they are created by the actions of individuals on your team.¹ So let’s take something like serving. Serving is important. You want to know how good your team is at serving, in a cumulative sense. However, remember that your team serving statistics are just the average of the 6-8 players who get a chance to serve in a match.

Here’s a little story.

One time I was coaching in a big tournament and our team came up a bit short. We had hopes to win this tournament, and, at the end of the tournament, our disappointed coaching staff was talking about what went well and what went wrong. The statement, “we didn’t serve well,” came up a few times. And that statement was true, but incomplete.

Factually, our team service numbers were a bit below-average for the tournament, which was troubling because we had been an exceptional serving team for most of that season. But, if you broke it down a bit more and looked at the individual serving numbers for the 8 players who served a significant amount of serves in that tournament, you’d see that:

2 players were well above their typical averages
4 players served about in line with their typical performance
2 players were way under their typical serving performance

This was especially rough because the two players who under-performed were 2 of our 3 best servers and one of them was regarded as possibly the best server in that particular competition. So you have 2 very strong servers who totally flip and, even though a lot of your team was fine from the service line, that can really drag down your total numbers. And if those 2 normally-excellent servers miss serves at critical moments, it’s going to have an even stronger emotional effect on you as a coach.

So, while it’s true that our overall serving numbers were down as a team, the right response here wasn’t to go into the next practice with a big speech² about how we need to serve better as a team and a multi-practice cycle dedicated to improving our serve. That would have been not allocating practice resources properly and probably would have left a couple players who did improve their serves wondering what the heck was going on.

The coaching approach that was more aligned with reality was to look at the 2 servers who performed well, and continue the work that they were doing. And then look at the 2 servers who underperformed and assess the potential causes (physical, mental, technical, randomness, etc) and plan accordingly.

Wait, Who Is “We”?

So we’ve seen that “we” can paint too broad a brush from an analytical situation, in a retrospective, coach-oriented situation. Now let’s look at the complete other setting: an emotionally-charged, player-to-player interaction.