What remains when you leave?

If I choose every drill, stop every mistake and settle every disagreement, I shouldn’t be astonished when people wait for the next instruction. They may be doing precisely what the arrangement has taught them to do.

That doesn’t make every pause my fault. A player might need information. A coach might be facing something unfamiliar. Some decisions should wait. But if I keep the plan in my head and the permission in my pocket, calling the group dependent feels a little cheeky.

With players, I could look at something ordinary: can they organise a familiar warm-up, recognise when a practice task isn’t working, or discuss an adjustment within boundaries we have agreed? I don’t need them to run the entire programme. I need to know which parts they understand well enough to own.

With coaches, the question follows them home from the course. Can they choose and adapt an activity for the players in front of them? Can they explain why they chose it? Or have I given them a session they can copy beautifully, provided nothing changes?

A folder full of drills can be useful. It cannot notice that half the group is lost.

There is research that helps me resist judging all this by how tidy the first session looks. Lorinkova, Pearsall and Sims studied 60 five-person teams completing a computer simulation. Teams had to share information and coordinate decisions across ten rounds.

In one condition, leaders developed a plan and directed members to carry it out. In the other, leaders were trained to involve members in setting goals and exchanging ideas. The directive teams performed better initially; the teams with more involvement improved more over time.[1]

This was a laboratory simulation, not a coaching course, and the leaders were not removed. It does not prove what happens when I leave. It does suggest that the approach producing the quickest early result may not produce the greatest improvement as a team develops.

For me, the practical question is how to give people a manageable piece of the work before they have to do it without me. A player group could choose between two familiar ways of organising an exercise and explain its choice. A coach could plan a short activity, lead it, and decide what to change after watching the response. I can still be there. I just don’t have to make every decision first.

Then I have to tolerate a choice that isn’t mine. If I invite someone to decide and immediately replace their answer with my preferred one, the invitation was mostly decoration. They are quite entitled to notice.

Stepping back also needs preparation. What is the purpose? What can they change? When should they ask for help? Leaving those questions unanswered and disappearing is not much of a development plan.

I don’t want to make myself unnecessary as some grand gesture. I want the player to have something useful when the rally starts, and the coach to have something useful when the course ends. Something they can use, question and adapt, even when I’m nowhere nearby to approve it.