Don’t let complaining distract your focus

It’s that time again, a major football tournament is ahead and teams are busy preparing and playing friendlies to test players, tactics and skills. Yesterday Germany played Hungary and this isn’t really the clash of titans it was 60 years ago. During the game players repeatedly showed and articulated their disagreement with the referee’s decisions. I never was a football referee, so I don’t really know if it was justified. And it doesn’t matter. When I am coaching basketball a behavior like that makes me angry. I don’t want my players to do so. If the ref is bad, I will address it, maybe the captain will talk to the men on the whistle once. In most cases referees won’t change anyway. What I want my players to do is to adapt to that situation. The ref is calling hand checking on every touch? Well, then don’t touch the dribbling player. You are supposed to stay in front of him with footwork, anyway. In my experience, players who go on complaining will simply waste too much energy on something not related to the team goal (winning probably, but not necessarily). Everyone on the team is responsible to do whatever is neccessary to reach the goal and the team as a whole will be accountable. Constant complaining is detrimental to the team in my opinion. Address the problem once and if that doesn’t help, change your style of playing. Inspect and adapt!

And this probably doesn’t just go for sports, but for agile development, too. When something is not the way you want it to be, take it to the team and the scrum master (assuming you are on a scrum team here). If the team agrees on changing, great! If it doesn’t, adapt to the situation. You are most likely still responsible for something and chances are high someone will hold the team accountable, too. Constant complaining won’t really change the situation, but take away your focus from reaching goals. And while we are at it: hiding and resignation is not a part of adapting. Maybe there really are some reasons why the situation is better like that.

To get back to basketball: When hand checking was called on every touch, many players didn’t want to adapt, because it was the way they had always defended. It took a lot of them some time to realize that it also meant more freedom on offense and a more attractive game in general, which most started to like, as players and as spectators.