Treatment Agreements - Building Relationships That Matter to Winning

Managing relationships on teams is just as important - if not more important - than managing Xs and Os. Two important questions that coaches and teams who are looking to increase their team's self-awareness and connectedness are: How well are we working together? How might we get better at it?

Treatment Agreements are a very important part of what I do as a coach because every athlete wants to receive feedback, praise, and criticism differently. Treatment Agreements systematically help us answer those two questions proactively and reactively.

Some athletes want to be praised publicly and criticized privately, and some need the complete opposite. For some athletes, how they receive praise and feedback truly doesn't matter, but for many, how we communicate with them could be the difference between our athletes giving us their best effort or shutting down on the team. 

Our athletes also respond differently to how coaches praise and criticize them versus how their teammates praise and criticize them.

I am currently coaching a Nike EYBL girls basketball team. EYBL stands for Elite Youth Basketball League. It is the most competitive high school basketball league in the country. In the EYBL, a very select group of high school girls compete on only 32 teams across the country. To be a top-level EYBL team, you have to have some of the top players in your area and quickly create a positive team culture.

Our biggest challenge is trying to get a group of girls, many of whom did not know each other before, to play with and for each other in an environment where they are competing with and for each other for exposure and scholarship opportunities.

It can be a cut-throat environment, and you don't have much time to create a winning, selfless culture, so you have to be very intentional about how you create a space where everyone feels safe being themselves, safe sharing vulnerability, and has a shared purpose.

We do some intentional things to create a shared purpose for the group by helping them identify their individual goals and mission for the summer, but we had to figure out how to build team chemistry to be successful because were aren't the most talented group and we haven't been together as long as some of the other teams.

Daniel Coyle has spent the last decade studying the best cultures around the world. He says that when we join a new team, our brains spend time and energy trying to decide if we belong or not. Our brains want to know if we are safe and if we have a future with this team and the people on it.

Great teams with great chemistry build great cultures through the exchange of belonging cues - small, meaningful, and impactful behaviors that say: "You belong here, you are valued here, you are safe here, we share a future together, we care about you, you have a voice, and you matter."

Treatment Agreements do all of this. They are like rules with a heartbeat. They set the tone for how we want to treat each other.

A Treatment Agreement is a set of basic ground rules that we ask all of our teammates to follow. The Treatment Agreement answers 3 basic questions:

1 - How do the athletes want to be treated (praised and coached up) by their coaches?
2 - How do the coaches want to be treated by their athletes?
3 - How do the athletes want to be treated (praised and held accountable) by their teammates?

As Daniel Coyle writes, feedback is one of the key pillars of high-performing teams, but feedback is tricky. Some athletes truly don't know how they really want to be treated, and some won’t give you the truth out of fear of feeling judged or because of a lack of trust.

Self-awareness requires some time for reflection, and when people join a new team, there is an understandable lack of trust. We beat this by getting vulnerable and staying vulnerable.

Here are four thoughts to use to help your athletes open up and share their truths:

Start With 'WHY'
We all have our reasons for why we do what we do. When doing a Treatment Agreement, we start with WHY we are doing them. We tell our athletes, “We want to make this the best experience we can for everyone and to do so, we need to know how you want to be praised and how you want to be held accountable. Opening up and being real and honest isn't always easy, but we need you to be honest with us so we can best help you and so that we can be the best team that we can be.”

Model Vulnerability (Leaders Go First)
Chemistry is created by small, repeated moments of vulnerability, and nothing is more powerful than when a coach shares their vulnerability. I share with my athletes that I have had to learn how to receive criticism publicly, and when I was growing up, I played best when my coach addressed me 1-on-1. Make it okay to be real and honest.

Hug The Messenger
Harvard professor Amy Edmonson says that we have to hug the messenger and let them know how much we need their feedback. When our athletes open up and share, thank them for being real and honest so that you can help them feel safe enough to continue to do so again.

No Jerk Rule
Finally, don't let anyone be mean or make fun of anyone else for opening up and being honest and real. Research shows that people on teams who value civility are 59% more likely to share information with each other than people on teams who don't. Define your expectations for how you expect everyone to be treated, manage it, and model it for your athletes.

How To Do It
In the classroom, we create Treatment Agreement posters. On one of the first days of school, we do this together and we hang it up somewhere visible and somewhere where we can access it. We go through each section together, and we revisit the Treatment Agreements every 9 weeks because grades go out every 9 weeks. 

With my basketball team, we use a less formal process. We only have 2 months together, and I’m not a very formal person. We get in a circle and I ask 4 questions:

1 - How do you want your coaches to praise you? Publicly or privately?

2 - How do you want your coaches to hold you accountable?Publicly or privately?

3 - How do you want your teammates to praise you? Publicly or privately?

4 - How do you want your teammates to hold you accountable? Publicly or privately?

This works well for us. I start, and we go in order, giving everyone the opportunity to share. It gives us the opportunity to have open conversations and get real with each other. We feel like our athletes are honest, and our athletes usually share similar thoughts, but in different ways. We validate the thoughts and feelings of everyone, and we are able to talk about the different needs that everybody has and how we can meet those needs while still holding each other meaningfully accountable.

We have two major tournaments each summer, one in May and one in June. We Circle and talked about our Treatment Agreement before the first tournament, and we do it again after the first tournament. The Treatment Agreement is a living document that can be changed at any time. Whenever we have issues with how we are treating each other, or when we have new teammates, we jump into a Circle and talk about it.

The key is getting your kids to be real and honest. Effectively explaining the reason for doing this, going first and modeling being real and vulnerable for them, hugging the messenger, and implementing a no-jerk policy definitely helps!!