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Essential team values
While having a chance of individual brilliance and the spotlight is something most people crave for, the best things are achieved by teamwork. By combining the talents of players with different capabilities, a task force can make higher than any one of the players in isolation. However, for this to happen, the team has to be appropriately led, with the right team culture and correct decision making. In the movie, ‘coach carter,’ The coach, serves an excellent example of how good leadership can be used to build teamwork, cohesion, and synergy in a sports and education setting.
Interdependence
The ability to rely on each other to accomplish team goals. At first sight, the team felt that they could do what they wanted by themselves with the set of rules they had been using. The good players felt privileged and elevated above the rest, making the others feel bad about themselves. The star players took time to learn that by becoming humble, supportive, and accommodating, they could enrich themselves immensely.
Coach carter taught them that by having the tallest player in the pitch mark the hugest opponent, the best dribbler moves the ball to advantageous positions the best shooters take their shots at the right moments. The best layup shooter s run with coordinated movements, winning would be hard. He introduces opponent marking patterns that won back possession as a result of the team effort. Away from that, he sends the whole team back to the library to study even when some have passed. This way, the more energetic students can help the weaker ones. Before long, they toil together, resume training, and are breaking new barriers.
Cohesiveness
The feeling that all group players are bonded together as one and that they will stick that way in all situations (Huang,290). The cohesive forces of a united front are more potent than any individual’s brilliance. In the first two days of taking over, coach carter lost two of his best scorers in the team to a walkout. To the players, this was a shaky moment as they were unsure of what would happen next.
Players like Cruz felt that their impact on the team was so vast that it would not move on without them. Thankfully, the rest of the group held firm with the coach and soon started raising eyebrows. The team decided to help Cruz out with his exercises as a show of unity, and that way, they were able to have him back in the group. They also stuck with the coach in an awkward moment when the tide seemed against him. The coach also killed the narrative against playing first-year students in the team. He dismantled all barriers to teamwork and set forth a formidable force that won a game after another.
Synergy
The ability to accomplish things better as a team than when alone. It is the fluidity of the whole group. According to Huang, it is good that the organization operates like one well-oiled machine (787). This means that the team should not anchor on one member such that their absence would leave a gap that would send the whole set up crumbling down. By letting go of players who felt they were too good, the coach set in motion a ball of energy that was generated by all the remaining players. When Cruz scored the ball other than making the last pass to his teammate as agreed, coach carter was furious. He wanted to make them understand that through a well-synchronized teamwork play, they could have higher chances of winning than individual brilliance. He, however, appreciated unique ability, giving each person a perfect opportunity to show their best in positions he thought best for them.
Shared Norms
These are the agreed modus operandi of the group that no member can flout. It is a set of teaching values that stick in the DNA of team members and guide relations and work. When coach carter takes over the team at Richmond high school, there are already shared norms. For the general community, passing students to college is a miracle. The teachers don’t care about the grades of the students and their class attendance record. The parents are satisfied with the little children can give. In the basketball court, the coach is just any other person out there. Foul and derogatory language is the norm for the team. However, when Carter takes over, he initiates a series of radical sweeping changes that change all of these.
He believes in the philosophy of discipline. He bans foul language in the court and insists on timeliness and interpersonal respect. Typically, these changes would rub feathers the wrong way (Salas, 301). He, however, takes it in his stride and sets in place corresponding punishments to instill his values. The team is in the process, cultivating a new set of norms that would guide their path to success. Some teachers feel the importance of the sweeping changes and join in. Expectedly. Some will always chicken out as did one teacher who bashed coach carter at a jury hearing to decide the fate of the lockdown. The long term effect of this is a show of unity when the coach is under fire. The players going on play strike in line with the coach’s values is a sign that a new set of norms has been implanted.
Leadership
Coach white had taken a laisser faire approach to leadership, leaving the whole team with no sense of direction. When coach carter came in, he immediately changed that. He showed these groups of boys that there was an authority to bow to. He used an authoritarian approach at first to establish complete control of things. Richmond high school was lacking leadership at large, and even the principal seemed to draw from the Carter school of administration. Worm, who was the captain, was sharpened even better for the job of leading decision making for the whole squad.
When there was disagreement over the lockdown, the school stakeholders got down for a meeting that had an undesirable outcome. The majority voted that the lockdown be lifted immediately. The crowd did not consider logical views from the coach, who was seeing the bigger picture form his own experience. It only served to prove that the majority decision making is not always the right decision. It is characteristic to see a crowd cheer out someone who invokes their ‘stupid’ mob mentality. They will grasp onto punchlines and call to action phrases that could have little benefit in the long end (Greenberg, 2).
Power and decision making
From a general point of view, decision making in the basketball team has been shaky. People are afraid to make decisions and wary of new ones (Hibbing et al., 67). Principal garrison is okay with the fact that students don’t perform, and she does not feel compelled to push them. Coach White feels overrun by the students. In a general sense of view, no one is making any decisions, and there is no sense of power or authority. When Coach Carter comes in, he immediately asserts his authority using a punitive and strict form of maintaining control. Gradually, the system adopts, including the teachers, parents, principal, and the basketball team. He faces quite some challenges as is expected, but in the end, everybody is happy with the sweeping changes. Coach carter is becoming the unnamed principal of the school.
Coach carter is very specific and knows what he wants. He is not letting anybody overrun him no matter the authority they wield in the school. He sticks to a ruthless timetable of activities and draws up contracts that are a genuine problem to the school community at first. He knows that all the factors surrounding the lives of these boys shall contribute to their success on the court and vice versa. He is not afraid to go physical with wayward students like Cruz, and this sends a message to the rest of the team, which toes the line.
Group thinking and its effects
This is loosely described as mob mentality or simply, ‘when a group is thinking, no one is thinking’ According to Lenman, this is the need to conform with the thinking of the group whether it is good or bad (640). In the movie, when coach Carter takes over the team from the previous coach, there are already rearing problems that are affecting their performance. They are satisfied with their poor work ethics and poor discipline. They have no respect for rules and think it’s okay for them to do so. For each player, it is better to stand with the bandwagon than stand for something.
Coach Carter’s initial problems start from debunking this mentality and making players know they can stand for what is right and not what the group feels is proper. When Cruz shows rebellion, he expects the group back up. When he walks out on the team time, and again, he is forced back when he realizes that the members have decided not to back him for general approval. Every individual is making a difficult choice of their own. The players are also taught to use the group in a constructive way that is not selfish.
The movie Coach Carter could be one of the best demonstrations of successful teamwork. Yet we can see that this success has to be worked hard for and requires the commitment of team members. The team members need to be committed to the ultimate goal of the process. The team leader must also be very decisive and firm to achieve desired goals. The style of leadership should also be one that limits prevalent feelings that might seek pleasure at the expense of the whole process. That way, the rest of the elements of teamwork easily fit into place to provide excellent results.
Works cited.
Carter, Thomas, director. Coach Carter. Netflix, 1 Jan. 2020.
Lenman, James. “Moral Inquiry and Mob Psychology.” The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophical Methods. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2015. 637-651.
Hibbing, John R., and John R. Alford. “Accepting authoritative decisions: Humans as wary cooperators.” American Journal of Political Science 48.1 (2004): 62-76.
Salas, Eduardo, et al. “Promoting effective leadership within multicultural teams: An event-based approach.” Leader development for transforming organizations (2004): 293-323.
Huang, Chi-Cheng. “Knowledge sharing and group cohesiveness on performance: An empirical study of technology R&D teams in Taiwan.” Technovation 29.11 (2009): 786-797.