Two Types of Coaches and The Generational Effect
Part One: The Two Types of Coaches
Many coaches fall into these two categories: The Aggressor and The Supporter.
The Aggressor is the stereotypical screamer. When I was a kid it was Bobby Knight. Now that I have kids, it’s the coaches that scream and stomp and harangue the kids or anyone who lands in their orbit at the wrong moment. Presently, it is harder than ever to get away with this without in-game penalty or societal pressure, but youth coach Aggressor will get their screams in where they can. In the pros, it’s the coaches who aren’t afraid to be ejected (Bell, Popovich, Belichick, etc.). The Aggressor is the coach who, when seen through the kind eyes of media, has the heart of gold and really cares for his players when the moment counts, but never stops pushing, pushing, pushing.
The Supporter is the coach who talks about how important the people on the team are, how important the families, how important that the team has fun while winning. He is the coach who has a Team Captain that never plays, except maybe when the team is up 20 in the fourth quarter. This is the coach that kids love to play for, and say so.
The Aggressor is the coach or parent who drives their kids. Not just to gymnastics classes, but to do better, to be better. They push and prod and pull and nag — homework, sports, art class, tests, foreign languages — all the way to college, and probably beyond. (Doctor? Lawyer? CEO?) They do so because, it often works, at least in the stories we tell later.
The famous Aggressors — Earl Woods, Richard Williams, Del Curry, Errol Musk — have all had stories told, about how they pushed to do this or that. At least in the media, these parents are The Aggressor. When the relationship stays good, it becomes a symbol of love, the heart of gold. When the relationship goes bad, the parent offered tough love and did their best.
The Supporter is the beloved coach or parent who provides encouragement. They find one-on-one lessons, drive to practice and attend every game, pick up books and videos, find and pay for tools, set up the camera, and clap along respectfully in the audience.
The stereotypical millennial parent is a Supporter. We imagine them as participation-trophy-demanding, PTA-joining, fundraiser-volunteering, back-patting coddlers. Some worry they are creating a generation of spoiled kids who expect accolades for every mediocre action.
Thinking about the dichotomy between the two types led me to wonder: What’s missing? Why do each of these archetypes resonate and repeat in the stories we tell? What can we learn from each type of coach? What’s good and what’s bad in their approaches? At first it seemed so obvious, then I connected some ideas, and found revelations.
First, let’s notice that as leaders (parents, employers, co-workers, managers, and yes, coaches) we look to help others achieve greatness. We just strive to do it without the attendant damage to the soul that is sometimes a by-product of achieving what no one else has. We want to create LeBron James without creating Michael Jordan, create Bill Murray without creating Chevy Chase, Bill Gates not Steve Jobs. The second of these pairs all seem pretty miserable, even in exceptional success.
Next, let’s notice that the stories we hear are the stories people retell. The supportive parent archetype lacks the attendant drama that stories need to be retold. Earl Woods cajoling his son to be the best golfer of all time through conflict is more interesting than the fact that he also put in thousands of hours of hard work and sacrifice, and that Tiger put in even more time and sacrificed more. The pithy fable of transcendent success always finds its audience.
Finally, realize that any common example I can give is going to be told through the stories that we’ve each heard, and the winners tend to have reach.
Overlap of the Models
The Aggressor model can lead to success with minimal damage if there is an underlying sense of support. It’s a dangerous line to walk, because The Aggressor, by dint of method, makes themselves an important part of the process. By making themselves integral to the success of the learner, there is always a fragile underlying structure. However, in the way that a thin cylinder can hold an incredible amount of weight, it can still work.
The Aggressors, to be successful, also have to be right — above reproach, rare to error, quick to acknowledge flaws. If you give great advice, then it’s hard to argue with how it’s delivered.
Parents instinctively turn into The Aggressor to stop the possibility of significant harm. “Don’t run into the street without looking both ways,” can be very valuable when shouted because the fear that a parent feels can extend to the child. In the workplace, a private dressing down for a critical failure can be extremely powerful. A respectful, direct and intense, “We need better,” is powerful. Note also, that it requires a change in volume. One tone all the time fails; yelling, or calm and supportive, doesn’t apply to every situation.
The Supporter model is worthless without modeling success. I can encourage my kids all day long to eat their vegetables, but if my pile of broccoli isn’t as big as theirs, it’s not going to work.
A good example of parental failure by being a weak supporter (that I am guilty of) is this: paying for grades. $10 for each A, $5 for each B. The failure is that it focuses on the result rather than the hard work required to achieve the result.
Hard work is necessary in both models to support greatness. It’s hard work throwing the thousand footballs for the learner to catch, or sitting with the student as they struggle through writing and essay or working a geometry problem.
This is a weakness of both styles that should also be noted: Each learner is different. In the 70s and 80s, the idea of dynamic coaching finally became widespread, mostly lead by the success of Hersey and Blanchard’s Situational Leadership. Something that school teachers could have told us for a hundred years became good business and coaching advice. Each person grows in their own way.
I am a learn-by-doing student, and I use the shame of failure to push me into success. Some people succeed with a learn-by-studying, trust-the-teacher type. Some of us will still run into the street until we hear the screeching of tires and feel the adrenaline. A high stress situation makes our memory sharp.
Hopefully, you already know which learner you are. To be the right leader, know which type of person you are leading.
Successes of Each Type
The best Aggressors and the best Supporters actually share critical aspects. Let’s look at how they succeed by combining these aspects, and also look at the societal effect of these styles, especially through the way we tell their stories.
The Aggressor
The success of this coach is through strict integrity and an underlying sense of love for the learner. Tough Love needs both to be successful. Tough without Love is just being a dick. Love without Tough is just enabling. They are both a straight line to failure. Just like we all think we are better than average at our jobs, so do The Aggressors. The truth is that only the best Aggressors are successful. This whole essay was based on an episode of the “Against The Rules” podcast by Michael Lewis that highlights a successful aggressor, and the whole point is the underlying love. *
The Supporter
This coach is successful through consistent work and modeling. There needs to be an underlying level of very hard work in The Supporter. This can happen through all the clapping from the stands and driving to lessons and offering tutoring. A student athlete can identify the distinct effort of their parent to be present and available. They, however, need the same level of rigor. They can celebrate the effort, and the success, but they must always be aware to not mitigate failure.
The Goals
Love should be unconditional, success can be determined by the participant. Everyone can be recognized for what they’ve achieved. A student needn’t be valedictorian to celebrate their efforts in school. We can each succeed on our own scale.
In a work environment, hard work is more critical because the leader needs to speak with total authority while avoiding over-explaining. A common failure of a manager is that the people doing the job they are “managing” are much better at it than they are. It only takes a handful of conversations before a supervisor is found out by the smartest employees if they are covering up a lack of knowledge. The best managers I’ve worked with not only said that they knew that I was better at my job than they could be, but they also tried to offer what they could that I couldn’t do for myself. The Supporter supports, they do not dictate. The challenging part is the communication.
Finally, recognize a few questions you can only answer for yourself. With which approach am I more comfortable? To which approach does the learner best respond?
Part Two: The Generational Effect
The thing that really got my mind churning as I thought about this was that trends tend to define generations. If history is written by the winners (which may be changing in our lifetimes), then eventually the story of Millenials will be written by Millennials. This leads to the paradox that every other generation can succinctly illustrate the downsides of their predecessors. “Ok Boomer” cuts so deep because Millenials understand better than Gen Xers what the true failings of Boomers are.
Each generation is so busy rebelling against the norm that the previous created that it can’t contextualize as well as the following generation.
I, and those Boomers, look at Millenials and worry what a generation of supportive parents will do to them. (“We had it tougher” is a refrain that everyone should shun from their vocabulary. I heard a Boomer say it best: “Don’t treat them as you were treated, treat them as you wish you had been.”)
My current theory is this: support will create a generation of successes if we can acknowledge that there must be systemic support. Let’s consider a list of successful, contentious leaders of their fields: Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and the 45th President.
I don’t think of it as coincidence that they each had missing or notably damaged fathers. Yet I don’t ignore that an incredible number of negative outcomes can be attributed to that situation. Correlation is not causation. My point is that these people were likely successful both because of and in spite of the failures of their parents. I singled out these three because when I looked deeper, I found something in common that I hadn’t considered at first.
Steve Jobs was put up for adoption and didn’t know his birth father, but he had supportive middle-class parents, incredible outward confidence, and the good fortune of being in the Silicon Valley in the late 1970s.
Jeff Bezos didn’t know his birth father and was born to a seventeen-year-old mother who married a Cuban immigrant that became his stepfather. By 4th grade, he was in a nice neighborhood, with supportive middle-class parents, and graduated from Princeton with an engineering degree that included computer science in 1986, just as personal computers were becoming ubiquitous and started an internet company when few people understood what the internet was. He was supported with $300,000 from his parents, a strong vote of confidence.
Fred Trump was a notably untrustworthy New York businessman who built a real-estate empire. He gave his fourth child presidency of his company in 1979, and Trump muddled his way through business and then political success with the distinct impression that all three of these men, and so many other successful people, share: I deserve this. I believe I can do this.
This is the interesting thread that successful Aggressors and Supporters provide: belief. If they didn’t believe in the learner they wouldn’t spend their time in their roles. They wouldn’t push and prod, or nudge and encourage. They wouldn’t put in the hours shouting encouragement, or sitting in the stands and clapping politely. In fact, the belief can be made very obvious to the learner. The hard work and the supportive encouragement; the You can do betters and the You worked very hard can join to communicate this critical idea: I believe in you.
If I believe I can do something I am more likely to do it, and if I believe it and am shown that it is possible, the success rate is even higher. The number of familial connections in Major League Baseball history bears this out, and evidence suggests it is not genetic. Your parent doing something makes it seem possible that you can do it as well. This, of course, applies to negatives as well. I can’t be the only one who has executed some of my parents’ bad habits.
Confidence can be pernicious when it falls prey to survivorship bias, but that basically describes overconfidence.* How one becomes confident without being overconfident is worthy of a book in itself.
Which brings this all back around to being The Supporter with the best characteristics of The Aggressor. My goal as a leader (or parent) is to encourage that fine balance of confidence and drive, of work ethic and satisfaction in a job well done, to encourage self-esteem.
I hope to see the outcome in a multitude of generations that believe in themselves enough to do well in their endeavors. Whether they have Aggressors or Supporters (or both) in their corner, the goal can be to arrive at a conclusion that all successful people can use: I believe I can do this.
Footnotes (Medium does not support footnotes, so this is my clunky format for using them):
* I love Michael Lewis and his compatriot Malcolm Gladwell, and I thought about a whole separate article about how their storytelling focuses on the story at the occasional cost of bias. Turns out someone already wrote it: Columbia Journalism Review.
* White male CEOs believe that the reason they are CEOs is that the market has successfully rewarded worthiness. It is so clear to even some of those white male CEOs, like Marc Andreessen, that the structure of the system will always be limited by connections which perpetuate these myths.
