Team part 1: The basic brick of the team - The individual Id like to throw in some thoughts regarding the idea exposed in a thread on Ocean Discovery about team building. I will start talking a bit about the individual before going to team. I do this because I believe that while a team can be the sum of the strengths of the members, it can also be the sum of their weakneses. And in serious situations, the weakest member of the team can determine the "breaking point" of the team.

For an (advanced) team to be succesfull, and result in a unified (dive) team I believe that it's potential members must meet a basic set of conditions:

1. Share the passion for the sport.
2. Have an open mind
3. Share a common set of *realistic* goals.
4. Share a minimum common level of knowledge in sport specific skills and theory. Differences in this level should be minimal.
5. Have a success oriented attitude
6. Have the ability to adhere to a set of standards and procedures which are adopted by the team for its operations.
7. Manifest a continous need for improvment in sport specific skills, general sport skills, theory (where aplicable), and mental training.
8. Subject themselves constantly to self assesment and peer assesment.
9. Adopt a common configuration for equipment and hardware.

While many of those 9 points are either self explanatory or have beaten to death as in the case of equipment configuration , Id like to explain a little more on some of the other points. Specifically:

Share Realistic goals:
Its clear that sharing goals is a condition to have a good team. However goals should be realistic as well. By reaching your goals in the near future,
you basically propel your motivation forward for the next set of goals. Setting unrealistic goals, and failing to reach them can act as a demoralizing agent , which will weaken the individual and implicitly the team
which have this individual as member. But goals shouldn't be too easy to reach also, so they should be set in such a way that a considerable amount of work and progress must be done to meet them.

Have a success oriented attitude

Simple. The individual should expect success. Failure is not a defining point in the evolution of the individual. Should failure to meet goals occur , the individual is prepared to learn from it, and derive a positive experience. Such individuals also often decouple their self-image from their actual performance. This should allow an individual to enjoy and derive new experiences , without having their self esteem lowered by eventual failures.

Improvment in sport specific skills, general sport skills, theory (where applicable), and mental training.

Mental traning is important in a individual. Even in a sport like diving.
There are situations when an inappropriate emotional state, strong emotions like anger or fear can spell disaster. An individual should cultivate his/her mental abilites, learn to control strong emotions, deal with fear (real or imaginary).

Subject themselves constantly to self assesment and peer assesment.

Self assesment is important. It is important to identify current levels of training, identify weaknesses and set goals for correcting the identified weaknesses. However, an even greater importance is to submitt yourself to peer review. While self assesment is a great asset for progress, it is still a subjective evaluation, and therefore should be completed with peer reviews.
In the process of a learning experience it is also important to ask your instructors for a complete assessment.

Individual Mental Training

In any sport mental training is very important, and mental and emotional aspects of training should always be considered.

Related to diving, for example, there are direct implications of the emotional state of mind and fear over diving. Think cave diving for example, and think at the old book "A blueprint for survival" by Exley, where at least two of the 10 commandments in the book are directly related to psychological factors and mental discipline. For those which haven't read the book, I refer to rule 4 , "avoid panic by building up experience slowly .... " and point 10 "never permit overconfidence to allow you to rationalize violating a recommended safety procedure".

But mental attitude and fears play a critical role in the educational part of an individual as well, although this may not be so obvious at first sight.

For example, a failure oriented attitude, will hinder progress of an individual towards goals. More so, a failure oriented individual will fear embarrasment and fear failure above anything. Such an individual will avoid failure at any price, instead of deriving a new experience from it, and move forward towards his goals.

A direct consequence of fear of failure may be that the individual will avoid high quality training, for example they will go forward with their training with an organization and instructor whose standards are lower, will avoid very good but tough instructors, and in a word he will move away from anything which even remotely can be a cause of failure.

A consequence of fear of embarasment can be, for example, to pass up an diving opportunity offered by a more experienced member of the comunity, because you fear that "you will look bad and be embarassed by your lack of skill"

This is why posts like "only 1% pass " on The decostop

The Deco Stop

exist in the first place. And to be fair, I hope that the instructor did not
scare the student by saying him "that 1% only pass". This can only add unnecessary burden to the student. Rather I hope the instructor told him:
"It will be very hard, but I will do anything which depends on me to see your goals for enrolling in my course come to life"

Team part 2: linking the individuals Preferably, a team should be formed by members which share as many as characteristics as discussed in the previous post. Some of them are mandatory, such a set of common goals, and passion for the sport, and the will to adhere to a set of common rules and procedures + equipment configurations adopted by the team, while others, such as slight differences in the techical level for the individual can be compensated for in training.

Many times when such individuals meet, assuming that they are not already part of estabilished teams, a natural bond will form, which is the first step towards building the tam. It is likely that an individual which meets another with which he shares so many charachteristics will prefer him as a member of a team to another person which doesn't share the same state of mind and goals.

Quote:
Originally Posted by deep6
unfortunately, it seems that divers that are in the best position to start this team-building process are often the most embarrassed, uninterested, or indifferent to this process - the recreational DIR divers!



Well nailed. From my point of view, creation of the team will not happen so
easily here. This is because I beleive the immediate goal is "to be a safe DIR rec diver", but for most of them the next goal misses them totally. Because of this, a motivation for progress doesn't always exist, and a team, even if one forms, will be focused on "lets meet next sunday and spend some time together diving" , rather than evolution to the next level of training and improvements in both individual and collective performance.

Don't get me wrong, such a team is OK as well, and can be safe and educated. And many people will genuinely want to stay at this level and not go further than that.

Here, I believe, the instructor can play a positive role. The instructor should try (especially instructors coming from agencies for which the team is central in diver education) to spark the need for continous self improvement and a thirst for knowledge in the individuals he has just trained. For many of them, this will be enough to want to know more, to be better, and help others to be better.

In other cases, as for example in places which are isolated geographically,
team members may initially share less common traits than above. This is because they might be the only potential members for a team there. Yet
as long as an open mind is kept, and players work together to meet
the required charachteristics and work for improving the team , this is OK.

In conclusion I beleive that the best teams are configured by individuals which share common profiles. It's only natural to be so. Its also for the best, because this way progress is natural and unhindered by capital differences in mind set and perception between the members.

Players in such a teams are powerfull ones, and can recognize easily individuals with similar charachteristcs. Don't dismiss a potential team member just because he was trained by agency "X" and you are trained by agency "Y". Recognize the potential and help a potential team member improve , of course if he accepts that =)

Team part 3: Coaching the team This is a complex part. A part about which I believe one can easily write books with hundred of pages, and a very hard subject to handle. Coaching a team is way more complex than coaching an indivdual, after all, despite the fact team members share a lot of traits, they are different human beings. Not only has one to deal with different humans, but also with the links and interdependencies between the humans forming the team.

Once individuals are linked together in the team, they must begin to think as a team. This doesn't mean that individual thinking is discouraged or negates the fact that each team member is unique. Yet each team member will contribute something, and will move the whole team towards the next common goal.

Maybe the best results are meet when the members of a team constantly train together. This has the advantage that the set of procedures and standards will almost become a religion for the team members, and the familiarity between members enables them to act as one.

The efficiency of this type of team was fully proved by military in many cases.

A point which is also important for the team, at least as important as it is for the individual, is self-evaluation and peer review. Like an individual , a team should assess itself and its workings, and constantly work to improve the team. Like an individual, a team should always exercise its weak points, not its strengths. Individuals should complement each other and function in such a way that one compensates for the other`s weakneses.

This is a interesting essay , with an unknown author, at least unknown for me. I believe it is a fitting closing remark for this post:

************************************************** *****
* Sense of a goose *
************************************************** *****

If we have as much sense as a goose, we will stay in formation with those people who are headed the same way we are.

It is sensible to take turns doing demanding jobs, whether with people or with geese flying south.

What messages do we give when we honk from behind?

If we have the sense of a goose, we will stand by each other like that.