One of the coolest tricks I’ve seen for running a skydiving team is rotating captainship between members…
The idea is exceedingly simple, yet the benefits are numerous. Shared captainship can help a team ramp up to productive training quickly and to develop a sense of mutual ownership among team members.
The Setup
The setup is very straight-forward. The training season naturally breaks down into a string of training camps (of whatever length, they can be weeks or weekends or even overnight tunnel). Each team member is assigned to act as captain for one or more consecutive camps at a time. An approach we took with a team was to rotate the responsibilities after every camp. Once everyone’s played captain once, the cycle starts again.
The Captain’s Role
The job of team captain grants control of the team but comes loaded with a slew of responsibilities. A few examples follow:
- Setting the training plan: team goals for the camp and the jump plan to support the goals.
- Navigating the training day: coordinating everyone’s arrival times in the morning, working with manifest, stopping the training day if productivity falls off.
- Resolving disagreements: making the call on a controversial engineering for a dive, deciding whether to jump in marginal conditions.
- Coordinating; travel and accommodations, sorting out expenses, and other minutiae.
The Coach
A coach can help the captain in various ways: help guide the training plan and technical development, act as liaison to manifest. The coach can also own captainship responsibilities entirely for some areas. For example, we opted to let our coaches take full control at wind tunnel camps.
Image by Windoor
The Benefits
Efficiency
Training can be very chaotic early on in the season as everyone is figuring out how to work together. The team members can waste time jockeying for control or sitting around in awkward indecision. Explicit captainship helps curtail both problems: there is a single decision-maker and driver.
Learning to Lead & Learning to Follow
Moreover as each team member takes on the cat-herding responsibilities, they experience first hand how stressful the job can be and how painful it can be to have their decisions second-guessed. The captain learns how to be a better leader and a better follower at the same time! Meanwhile, the rest of the team enjoys the opportunity to observe different leadership styles and note how they can improve next time they are captain.
We rotated the captain in Asaar. It made everyone take more responsibility and developed leadership qualities in individuals when they realized we trusted them to run the team”
Craig Girard
Cycle of Improvement
The first cycle of captainship is difficult, whether you’re a natural leader or an instinctive follower. The second cycle however, is much easier; the team virtually runs itself!
Team Routines Develop
Just as the team members start to settle into their ‘roles’, the team sees some of the routines begin to take shape: morning stretching and goal setting, jump preparation and debriefing, end-of-day debriefing. Each member inevitably has opinions on the routines and they are given the freedom to try to tweak things the next time they are captain. For example, Vibe experimented with stretching at the hotel and arriving at the DZ warm. Collectively, we got to try a number of tweaks and ultimately settled on routines that worked for everyone.
Mutual Ownership
The same principle applies to technical direction of training; everyone gets an opportunity to set team goals, program the skydives and experiment with engineering. In addition to flying his own slot, every member contributes to the team’s direction and growth. A mutual sense of ownership develops organically.
Summary
If you haven’t had the pleasure of being part of a team with shared captainship, give it a try. You might find it solves potential conflicts by allowing everyone to try their own ideas instead of arguing about them. It’s tried and tested, it works with all levels of teams from recreational to professional – why wouldn’t it work for you?
