Player-Coach: How to Shift from Subject Matter Expert to Leader and Get the Best from the Team

By Tammy Martin and Val Markos

Player-Coach is your playbook for successfully navigating the transition from workplace team member to manager.There are workplace teams, and there are managers. But what about the role that straddles both worlds? Just as some athletes stay in the game and also coach their team, the business player-coach is a doer and a leader at the same time.Shifting from purely doing to leading others can be a challenging transition—but with the right knowledge and skills, anyone can thrive in this role. In Player-Coach, HR experts and leadership development experts Val Markos and Tammy Martin provide invaluable advice for team members navigating this shift into management.Armed with a four-part leadership model and key concepts, you will be empowered to become an effective—even great—leader. Filled with real-life experiences, stories and tips on developing the critical skills every player-coach needs to be successful, Player-Coach is your how-to guide to moving from the team bench to the team coach.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tammy Martin
• Release date: Oct 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781733343114

Tammy Martin

Val Markos and Tammy Martin are the principals of Player-Coach Leadership, specializing in helping subject experts transition to leadership positions. Val received a PhD in Psychology from the University of Georgia, and worked across a variety of leadership development roles with the City of Miami, Florida; US Steel; and BellSouth, before dedicating himself to a private coaching practice for executives. Tammy began her professional career as a graphic artist before serving in various leadership roles over her thirty-year career with BellSouth and AT&T. She found her passion in working with leaders to excel at leading others, spending the bulk of her tenure to human resource management and leadership development.

Book preview

Player-Coach: Moving from Subject Matter Expert to Leader and Getting the Best from the Team. Val Markos PhD and Tammy Martin.

Praise for Player-Coach

"Player-Coach addresses a critical need for both business and HR professionals, offering guidance for individuals transitioning from a role as a subject matter expert to one of a team leader. The four-part leadership model will help functional experts become effective leaders. The authors give readers a blend of real-life stories, essential tips, and insights that take new player-coaches on a journey of developing the critical skills necessary to become excellent leaders, motivators, and mentors."

Debbie Storey, President & CEO, AT&T Performing Arts Center

"Player-Coach is a terrific resource for either an emerging or an experienced leader. Val Markos and Tammy Martin do a great job of communicating a clear step-by-step process for becoming a more effective player-coach."

Tim Tassopoulos, President & COO, Chick-fil-A, Inc.

"Much is written about the challenges faced by those promoted over their peers. By focusing on those who play and coach, Val Markos and Tammy Martin shine a light on the advantages that these leaders have over those rotated into leadership roles. Leaders elevated into the player-coach role are uniquely suited to identify meaningful development opportunities and on-the-job growth experiences to prepare the team for leadership responsibilities. Just another of the tried-and-true insights captured in Player-Coach!"

Helene Lollis, President & CEO, Pathbuilders

Val Markos and Tammy Martin provide great insights and practical advice on how to master the tenuous balance between these two critical roles —player and coach. It’s definitely worth a read!

Marc Effron, President, The Talent Strategy Group

What do executives say about player-coaches?

Player-coach is about the work you are doing. Are you one of the team or are you doing others’ work? Managing your team is a big part of a coach’s job lower in an organization, and then as you progress, the mix of what you do changes.

a technology executive

"Relinquishing expertise can be an issue for player-coaches and for the organization. Some players will never succeed at being an effective coach because they just cannot give up being the expert. And many people get stuck growing as a coach because the organization values their expertise and doesn’t want to let go of it."

a human resources executive

I was brought into the business because of my experience in litigation; my natural default was to be a player. I was asked to switch gears to non-billable work and that was hard to do. My challenge was to be intentional about ‘coach’ work. It’s like a new muscle that isn’t as strong as all the others.

a legal executive

I’ve often seen the best salesperson, the best clinician, or the best financial mind getting promoted to coach. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always mean the best leader gets promoted.

a healthcare executive

Leaders who have been a part of large organizations seem to have an easier time moving from subject matter expert to leader because they’ve had access to more support mechanisms, like development experiences and training.

a human resources executive

It’s a real challenge when some player-coaches want perfection. As a player they may have been able to manage perfection, or what they thought was perfection, as an individual contributor. Managing perfection is difficult when one’s scope increases like that of a coach/leader. You have to continually ask yourself on each task: ‘Do I have to do that?’

a financial executive

Player-CoachVal Markos PhD and Tammy Martin. Player-Coach: Moving from Subject Matter Expert to Leader and Getting the Best from the Team. Player-Coach Leadership PressPlayer-Coach

Copyright © 2019 Val Markos and Tammy Martin

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations, embodied in reviews and articles.

ISBN 978-1-7333431-0-7 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-7333431-1-4 (ebook)

Published by Player-Coach Leadership Press

www.playercoachleadership.com

Produced by Page Two

www.pagetwo.com

Cover and interior design by Taysia Louie

Interior illustrations by Jennifer Lum

Ebook by Bright Wing Books (brightwing.ca)

www.playercoachleadership.com

Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One

The Player-Coach

1Moving from Doing to Leading

Part Two

A Player-Coach Success Model

2Set Direction

3Secure Resources

4Coach Individuals

5Build Team

Part Three

Critical Skills and Growth

6Critical Skills

7Developing Player-Coaches

Closing

Notes

Landmarks

Cover

Copyright Page

Table of Contents

Body Matter

Acknowledg­ments

Thank you to the many contributors and leaders who helped shape our careers, thoughts, and capabilities. Today’s business environment demands more and more from coaches, leaders, and executives, yet the time and resources to support growth for these roles can fall short. From our experiences and interviews with several executives across an array of fields, we were inspired to put into writing a model that highlights the areas of focus one must concentrate on when stepping up from a subject matter expert (player) to a leader (coach) of those in the same or similar expertise. Whether you are the player, a coach, or a supporter, we hope you find this model helpful in your pursuit to lead, encourage, and influence growth and development in future leaders.

To Don Hallacy, Helene Lollis, Patrick Moore, Joey Schultz, Nimesh Shah, Lynette Smith, Monica Smith, and Anna Stevens—your insights and input were invaluable. Thank you for your time and commitment to leading others.

To our families and colleagues, your support is immeasurable.

With all gratitude,

Val and Tammy

Introduction

In late 2017 , I was invited to do a presentation on leadership concepts at a leadership development program. The participants came from a wide variety of companies and industries and had been promoted within their respective staff functions—finance, compliance, legal, human resources ( HR ), and information technology—and were now function leaders. Helene, the program director, told me that through interviews and background research she had already identified ‘work-life balance’ and ‘people management’ as the two most common issues for the group. As an experienced executive coach and corporate human resources professional, I knew exactly what she was talking about.

Based on my own research, I know that it is a common occurrence for new subject matter experts to struggle in their role because they believe that their value is their expertise, and that belief can get in the way of their leadership role. They don’t realize that their new role is more about coaching others to do the work than the application of their expertise. After all, I experienced the same thing when I started my career after eight years of college and graduate school: I stepped into a leadership position after years of training to be an expert. I knew all about the pressures—often self-imposed—of needing to be a leader while still being looked upon to provide subject matter expertise.

This concept became the inspiration for my presentation, that portion of the session was titled ‘Player-Coach,’ and I wove some aspects of what has become our player-coach model into the discussion. The concept and the model were both very well received. As I was presenting, a young participant raised her hand and mentioned how relevant and helpful this discussion was to her. She also asked, Where can I continue to learn about this concept of being an effective player-coach? I told her I didn’t know of anything off the top of my head, but I would be glad to find her some resources.

After the session, Helene approached me, congratulated me on my successful presentation, and proclaimed, Good luck finding some resources! I do a lot of reading and your comments on this concept are unique—I haven’t heard anyone else touch on this topic. As I left the event, I thought to myself, "I could suggest several general leadership books, but nothing that specifically addresses the challenges of a player-coach…" And the idea for this book was born.

I decided to invite my colleague Tammy Martin to join me in this endeavor. We worked together for over a decade at a large Fortune 500 corporation and have witnessed the trajectory of many player-coaches—some extremely successful, and some very disappointing—and Tammy has coached and managed many more in her continued career. We have witnessed the struggles and celebrated and praised those who excelled at developing into great player-coaches.

Val

My leadership journey is different from Val’s. My degree is in journalism with an emphasis in graphic arts. During college, and for three years post-college, I was truly developing my skills in journalism/graphic arts. In the early 1980s, before Macs and PowerPoint, I was offered a graphic arts position in the large corporation Val mentioned. Graphic arts was not a core competency of the company, but rather a specialty that saved the company money. In fact, in the beginning, only two people in a company of 100,000 employees performed the role. As the demand for our group’s skills grew within the company, our team expanded to almost ten. For about a year, I was a player-coach as a graphic artist before I was asked to be the leader of the group. I guess you could say I was a jump-start player-coach!

When the leadership in my department realized I excelled as a manager of people and workflow, I was asked to focus more on leadership than my professional expertise (graphic arts). As our team took on more and more administrative services (copy, mail, supply, graphics, etc.) for the company’s headquarters location, I shifted from being a leader of administrative services to leading small- to medium-sized teams in IT, operations, and communications. After about ten years with the company, I joined the human resources (HR) function and never looked back.

As an HR executive responsible for high-potential development and supporting one-third of an organization of over 300,000 employees, I observed and coached numerous player-coaches for twenty years. I was thrilled when Val asked me to join him on this adventure and couldn’t wait to share my experiences on the player-coach journey.

Tammy

When we started our research for this book, we contacted a number of successful player-coaches who we met through the years and asked them to share some of their most memorable professional experiences and approaches to both playing and coaching. Their breadth of knowledge provided us with some new insights, but mostly reinforced the perspectives we provide in the player-coach model, and the skills and behaviors we believe