Club Management Course part 1 - Communication and Leadership

The Background

I feel very comfortable as head of the table tennis department at NTSV. The department is small (just over 150 members), my predecessor is still available to answer any questions I may have, and we have completed a comprehensive handover. Furthermore, I don't see the basic tasks as a major challenge – with "work to rule," the necessary tasks are completed quickly.

However, my goals for the department and my expectations of my role go beyond work to rule. My vision encompasses the following aspects:

• We offer as many children as possible the opportunity to play table tennis (focus on youth development).
• We offer enthusiastic young people the opportunity for intensive training to support and encourage their enthusiasm for sports (focus on competitive sports).
• We focus on girls and create a comfortable environment for their training.

This vision is based on the core value of appreciation. Appreciation is characterized by respectful and empathetic interaction. It is lived out in team spirit, fairness, and tolerance.

But how can I implement my vision? What am I allowed to do in a club (as opposed to a company)? What do I have to pay attention to, and which rules and frameworks do I follow?

To answer these questions, I decided to attend the Club Management Course. The first weekend module covered "Communication and Leadership."

Insights on topic Communication

Below are my notes on the topic. Thanks to the training, I have gained a more in-depth understanding of some details:

• With the right mindset, perceive every conversation or contact as an opportunity, especially the "difficult" and "uncomfortable" conversations. These contain a lot of potential that would otherwise be wasted.
• Clarity of roles is crucial to prevent misunderstandings, especially in environments where I take on multiple roles (e.g., department head, team member, or trainer).
• I ignore reading body language until I observe irritation in a conversation. Irritation refers to the gut feeling that "Something's wrong or weird." Otherwise, crossed legs, folded arms, or similar postures are adopted for convenience or other trivial reasons.
• Get to the point on critical topics to make the other person's understanding easier. If the wording is too rambling, it helps to formulate the points in a foreign language I'm not fluent in—in my case, English.
• Only criticize behavior—You come late—and not your being—You are late. Behavior can be changed, but who we are not. And no one has the right to criticize your being.

In addition to my notes, I would like to emphasize two points in general that cannot be repeated and emphasized often enough:

• Active listening is the methodology for truly engaging in dialogue with someone. With a touch of empathy (keyword: changing perspective), this opens up all sorts of opportunities to avoiding or resolving conflicts. This reminds me of a woman shopping today whose T-shirt read, "Peace starts with Empathy."
• Four-ears model to illustrate what resonates in a conversation between sender and receiver. Awareness of this can, on the one hand, help improve communication and, on the other, illustrate how easily misunderstandings can arise unintentionally (and how critical active listening is).

Leadership insights

In leadership, I had a key insight during a role-play. The exercise involved working in pairs—one person's role was on the radio in the taxi dispatch center, the other as the new driver in the taxi. An urgent request was to be passed from the dispatch center to the driver. Everyone had a map of the city in front of them. I was sitting in the dispatch center.

The framing of the task, my assumptions, and the time pressure let me screw up the task completely. Instead of getting a clear picture of the situation and trusting in the driver's abilities, I started telling the route using left-right directions on the map. It took us a long time to realize that our maps were different. Even then, I still couldn't direct the driver to the passenger. Other teams finished the task after five minutes, while we were still trying to find the passenger. That was a terrible feeling. What went wrong?

1. The task description (new driver) led me to assume the driver didn't know the route. I didn't even think twice about asking if he knew the address or trust in his capabilities.
2. Due to time constraints, I started directly with the right-left instructions instead of coordinating the entire task with the driver. This left the driver unable to support me because he didn't know the destination or what was happening.
3. My micromanagement (left-right instructions) kept me active the entire time without doing anything valuable. I didn't have time to validate my (incorrect) assumptions or think about the task as a whole (I hadn't even read the task on paper).

I described this exercise to the team and asked for feedback. This yielded a few insights:

• When defining tasks, I should focus less on detailing the solution (micromanagement).
• When discussing challenges, I should not immediately think about solutions, but take the time to understand the problem and weigh the options (avoiding hasty action under time pressure) as part of the team discussion.

I am delighted with the outcome. Before the training, I couldn't have imagined this outcome.

Conclusion

In this module, the fundamentals were taught by the excellent trainer Olivia Dorn. Thanks to my previous training (I reported here) and my daily work in an agile software development environment, I was already well-prepared for the topic. This is precisely why I was able to gain a lot from the repetition. It's like a refresher course in first aid – I've heard it all before; really knowing it and actively applying it, or specifically recalling it stressed: that's when you understand the basics.

Next are the marketing and event management modules with Thore Hansen – I’m excited to see what I can learn from these two days.