Coaches & Leadership
There’s a version of coaching pressure that the devotionals about team performance don’t fully address.
It’s the personal one. The awareness that this season’s results may determine whether you’re in this chair next year. Whether your staff is employed. Whether the program you’ve been building continues or gets handed to someone else.
That pressure is real. And it affects how you lead in ways that deserve honest acknowledgment.
Read this passage slowly.
I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through him who gives me strength.
Philippians 4:11–13 — NIVLet that sit for a second before you move.
I have learned to be content. Not I was born content. I learned it. Through circumstances that included both abundance and need, both the secure seasons and the precarious ones. And the contentment Paul describes is not indifference to the outcome. It’s a stability that doesn’t depend on the outcome for its foundation.
Job insecurity does something specific to coaching. It creates the temptation to make decisions based on what protects the job rather than what serves the team. The lineup choice that plays it safe rather than develops the right people. The culture decision that avoids conflict to preserve short-term results rather than building the right thing for the long term. The relationship with administration that becomes about managing perceptions rather than honest assessment of where the program is.
The coach who is leading from fear of job loss is not fully present to the work. They’re managing two things at once — the team and their own survival — and the divided attention shows in the quality of both.
The path through it is the one Paul describes: the contentment that comes from locating your foundation in something more permanent than your employment status. Your identity is not your job title. Your worth is not your win-loss record. And the work you’re doing right now has value that doesn’t depend on whether you’re retained to do it next year.
Lead from that foundation. The decisions get cleaner. The coaching gets better. And the job outcomes — whatever they are — come from a place you can actually be proud of.
The coach leading from fear of job loss is managing two things at once. The divided attention shows in the quality of both.
Is fear of job loss affecting any of the decisions you’re making right now? Where are you choosing what’s safe over what’s right?
This is a very personal and vulnerable question. It may be more appropriate as a private reflection than a group discussion.
Your identity is not your job title. Lead from the foundation that’s more permanent than your employment.
This devotional is almost always better as a private reflection or a conversation with a trusted peer coach rather than a group coaching staff meeting.