See How Easily You Can Increase Your Team's Attention To Detail

I'm sure we've all heard those crazy stories about what stars demand for appearances. Here's a few of them:

Apparently singer Barbara Streisand asks for peach colored toilet paper because it matches her skin;
Mariah Carey asks for a new toilet seat to be installed in all of her hotel rooms;
I guess Beyonce asks for her room to be exactly seventy-eight degrees.

I'm sure you could find this and more information by doing an internet search for "ridiculous celebrity demands" and I certainly don't know if what you'll find is true or not, but that's not the point. The point is demanding attention to detail from the people around us...most importantly our teams. I always thought celebrities were being prima donnas by asking all of this stuff, but it turns out there's more to it.

In his article, No Brown M&M's! David Lee Roth and the Power of Checklists, Tim Ferris (fourhourworkweek.com) gives us some insight into why celebrities sometimes make eccentric demands. Stars give their hosts a checklist of hundreds of things, ninety-nine percent of which is vital to making their appearance successful. The one percent of eccentricity is designed to find out whether their host actually read the checklist and followed through. For David Lee Roth, having brown m & m's in his room meant there could be other, potentially life-threatening, mistakes on the horizon...so a full inventory of the checklist had to be completed.

So how does this apply to us as coaches? Think about the long checklist of duties we have for our players:

Work hard
Give 100% effort
Support your teammates
Lift weights
Go to the training room
Come early
Stay late
Hang out together outside of practice
Get good grades
Compete for your position
Be a good leader
Be a good follower
Workout over the summer
And the list goes on and on!

Surely, we believe that all of these things (and more) are important and essential for our teams to thrive. It's a lot for one person to remember, now think about what we have to do: manage these expectations for ten to twenty players!

So what am I suggesting? Most importantly, that our players need to know (and see) what our expectations of them are...maybe put them in the team handbook. It's much harder to miss the mark when they know where the target is.

The idea behind all of this isn't to drive our players crazy, but to hold them accountable.

Can you think of accountability tactics coaches could use with their players? What would our "brown M & M's" be? Hit me up on Twitter if you come up with any ideas!

Dawn Redd is the Head Volleyball Coach at Beloit College. Come visit Coach Dawn's community of coaching nerds and team leaders over at her blog, http://www.coachdawnwrites.com, where she teaches how to become an excellent coach, motivate individuals, and build successful teams.

Her book, Coach Dawn's Guide To Motivating Female Athletes, is available for purchase on her website.

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