What is the hardest thing about being a team captain?
If you are the captain or you are the department chair or you are the coach, you have to do the right thing for the team. You have to do the right thing for the group. There is no easy way to do it and it will not always be comfortable, but that's OK. Because the bottom line is that the team comes first. What the team needs, that’s what a captain has to do.
How do you know if you would be a good captain?
You don’t have to be perfect at it, there is no perfect captain. I was certainly not perfect and I don’t know any captain who was. But what I do know is that they were willing to take a risk and communicate honestly and directly when they knew something needed to be said. If you are willing to be that person, you can be a great captain.
What did you learn from being a captain that helped you in later life?
Well, I think as a captain one of the things you learn also is how to talk to different people on the team. There’s some people who you can be very direct in your communication with. There’s some people that you have to employ what I call the velvet hammer, where you let them know you are there for them, you’re their friend. You go ahead and tell them the thing that is bothering you or you think is bothering the team and you follow that up with a nice comment. Those kind of things I think help with some of the people that are defensive sometimes or very insecure about their place on the team and what they are doing.
What do you do when your team doesn’t accept your leadership?
So leadership – managing people, that’s basically what you’re doing as a captain – it is not easy. And as I said before it won’t be comfortable. There will be times where the team may not be very accepting of your captaining or your captain’s management style. But one of the things you have to do is be responsive to the team. But you also have to know that there are certain times when maybe not the whole, you might not have the whole team behind you as a captain and in employing what you want to do with the team. But if you have just enough, sometimes four key people are enough, sometimes six people are enough, sometimes eight people are enough. If you can get enough people moving in the right direction, you could save the season of the team. It doesn’t have to be everybody. You hope it is, ideally it is. But even if it isn’t, if you can get just enough people to buy into what you are trying to get the team to be and you can sell them on your vision of what you want the team to be, that may be just enough.
