The “good job fallacy” and the undermining of coach-player communication.

I was recently watching a sports docuseries on Netflix and witnessed an interaction between the coach and a player that reminded me of how often coaches muddy communication and undermined trust by sending conflicting messages.

In this particular scene, the coach is critiquing the player’s performance in training and then follows his critique by telling the player “good job today.” The punctuation of “good job today” struck me as so contradictory as the coach had preceded it with a critique. One on hand, he says, “you need to do better” and then follows it with “you did a good job today.”

This exchange reminded me of the countless times I have used this same contradictory construct when speaking with my players. In retrospect, I believe I was feeling unconformable about critiquing the player and wanted to soften that critique with a little positive boost of telling him/her “good job.” Regardless of my reasoning, I can see now that I was not helping the player; instead, I was sending him/her mixed messages that could easily cause confusion, doubt, and undermine the trust in our relationship.

We have all heard about the feedback sandwich and its assertion that criticism should be sandwiched between two “buns” of praise. Without digging into the particulars of this method, one can easily see that if we can accept this method as being useful, then the approach laid out above is missing a bun. Heretofore we will refer to this critique-the “good job” construct as the “open face.”

As a case study of this open-face sandwich style of communication, I once worked with a coach who was extremely hesitant to give players honest feedback. This hesitancy was most apparent when the inevitable question about playing time would come up. The player is seeking reasoning; her ego is freaking out because her identity is tied to her image as a player, and to date, she is not playing and thus feeling like crap. If you have coached at any level above age 10, you probably have confronted this. So the player is seeking reasoning and this particular coach—who is not unique in her reaction—does not want to add further distress to the player, so she punts and gives the player a checklist of sorts as the reason for her lack of playing time. By this, I mean the coach would say something like “you need to pass the ball harder” and follow it with the “good job” mood enhancer. The player, in turn, would attend the next practice session hellbent on passing the ball with the force of a thousand hurricanes, all the while looking at the coach each time to signal her compliance with the coach’s proclamation.

The next game would come around, and the player still wouldn’t play, so she returns to the coach and asks again, this time adding, “I worked on my passing.” The coach, again wanting to deflect the inherent conflict, adds another item to the checklist—“you need to talk more on the field…oh, and good job” Thus the cycle repeats; the player attends the next practice session and puts on a clinic for Toastmasters International, with her voice reportedly heard 6 miles away. The game comes around and, you guessed it, she doesn’t play. Rinse, wash, repeat.

It is about this time that the player catches on that the coach is unable or incapable of giving her honest feedback and thus also incapable of providing sincere praise. The open-face sandwich is therefore reduced to naked meat sitting coldly on the empty deli counter of broken-down communication. The relationship between the player and the coach breaks down, and per my previous post on team communication, the dejected player is now a viral source of negativity. Once this player links up with others who have figured out that they are being strung along by a coach unable to give honest feedback/praise, you have a full-fledged revolt just waiting to pop off, all because the coach got her deli order mixed up.

There is a lot here about communication that could be unpacked, but for this article, I return to the idea that how we communicate matters a great deal. The open-faced sandwich (criticism-praise) is a construct that might make a coach feel better but ultimately takes from the trusting relationships that form the core of effective player/coach pairings. If you want to critique, then do so in a compassionate, empathic way. That is your job, and if you find that uncomfortable, then that is indicative of your unresolved issues. I believe players respect those who can speak frankly with them, at least that has been my experience. On the other hand, if you want to praise, then do so sincerely and help the player find his/her inner cheerleader because I think those are in short supply.

People, especially young people, are not sandwiches. They are emotional beings that need support and love. Keep your bread with your bread and your meat with your meat and instead think about how your words best add to or detract from the playing experience.