Leadership and Coaching Analysis of the film Miracle
Sara Schoenhoft
Leadership in Sport: ESS 520
2/8/11
Miracle is a film that depicts the true story of the 1980 United States Men’s Hockey team as they prepare and compete in the Winter Olympics at Lake Placid. Herb Brooks, the head coach, along with his assistant coach Craig Patrick, tackle the difficult task of preparing young men, most just out of college, to play against the toughest competition the world has to offer. Their coaching styles, strategies, and interactions with the players all contribute to the success of the team. Their unique leadership styles help guide the team to a huge upset over the Soviet Union and an eventual gold medal at the 1980 Olympics. Even though I have seen this movie several times, it was interesting to specifically watch and then analyze the leadership and coaching styles of Herb and Craig.
The movie begins as Herb is first arguing his case to win the position of head coach, and then is picking his team to take to the Olympics. The tryout scene (Miracle 11:00-14:00) consists of Herb watching the players for one day and choosing his players without consulting anyone else, even his assistant coach. Decision making is an important aspect of leading, and how a coach makes his or her decisions can have a huge impact on the players, fans, management, and anyone else who might be involved. Victor Vroom and Phillip Yetton developed a model (Vroom-Yetton Decision Model) to help those in leadership positions make decisions in a variety of different situations. The model consists of a series of questions that the leader must ask themselves, which then point to a specific decision making strategy. Some of the different strategies include autocratic decisions, collaborative decisions, and collective decisions (http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTED_91.htm).
The first question deals with the importance of the quality of the decision. In this case, the choosing of the Olympic team, the quality of the decision is extremely important. The next question asks if there is sufficient information to make a high-quality decision. Herb only watched the players for one day even there was a week of tryouts scheduled, so that may seem like he did not have enough information. However, Herb tell Craig that he watched film, he coached many of the players, and he talked to the coaches of the kids who hadn’t played for him, so he had done extensive background work so that he did have enough information to make a quality decision. In addition, he had a very specific idea of the type of player that he wanted so he knew exactly what to look for. Therefore, the answer to the second question is also yes. The third question asks if the problem is structured, that is, is the problem well-understood so that a good solution is easily defined. The answer to this question is yes because Herb knew exactly what he wanted his team to look like. He wasn’t looking for all-stars; he was looking for guys who would work hard and who would do what was best for the team. The fourth and fifth questions both deal with others involved and if the decision would be accepted and if the goals are the same across all involved with the Olympic team. In terms of other accepting his decision, there was definitely some backlash from the top because the advisory board didn’t get a say. But, in the end, they had chosen Herb to lead the team to the gold medal so they put their trust in him. And everyone shared the same goal of putting together the best team possible to compete at the Olympics.
Answering yes to both of those questions leads to the best decision making strategy as outlined by Vroom and Yetton. Herb’s decision was definitely autocratic, he made the decision all on his own, but it would be labeled as autocratic II because he did use other coaches and film to get a background on the players and thus help him make a better decision. This is a good strategy in this situation according to Vroom and Yetton. Even though Herb took matters completely into his own hands and chose his team all on his own, the situation at hand made that possible for Herb’s decision making strategy to be successful.
Once the team is chosen, the movie starts to get going with meeting the players and starting practice and competition. It is interesting to watch the evolution of the team and how they go from a bunch of rival college kids to an Olympic hockey team. The coaches definitely play a role in their evolution as a team and lead them to perform at their absolute best. The Group Evolution Model is a model that describes four stages of group evolution: forming, storming, norming, and performing. (Allerman, 2004) As a coach, it is the goal to take a team from the forming stage and progress to the performing stage by the time the big championship game rolls around. In Miracle, we watched the team go from forming to performing in six short months.
The forming stage is really just the team members getting to know each other. Everything is light, people are happy, and problems haven’t started to pop up yet. When Craig is calling out the names of those who were chosen for the team (Miracle 14:00-14:45), the boys are all smiles and congratulating each other. This is the forming stage. Right after Craig calls out the names, Herb walks in and immediately adds fire to the team, helping move them to the storming phase (Miracle 15:20). He tells them that the ones who went home were the lucky ones. They, being the chosen ones, are going to have a rough road and that more of them will be going home before the Games start. This immediately puts them on the defensive knowing that they will be competing with each other for the final roster slots.
The storming phase is in full swing when college rivals start to get heated in the bar scene (Miracle 19:45) and when they turn to all out fighting during practice (Miracle 21:15). Herb recognizes this in his team and lets the boys fight it out, even stopping Craig from going to break it up. Teams have to progress through the stages to perform in the end, so storming, though it can be difficult, is a necessary stage for a team to go through. The storming phase is full of conflict between teammates, between coaches and teammates, and an overall unrest in the team.
Herb works hard to push his team from storming to norming- the next phase in group evolution. Norming is the phase when the team has come together and is starting to gel as one unit. In order to get his team to this phase, Herb works his players so hard that they don’t have time to hate each other. He also encourages them to let go of old rivalries and become a team (Miracle 23:00). One of the most powerful scenes in the movie depicts the shift from storming to norming when Herb makes his team do sprints over and over again after a poor performance (Miracle 39:40). As the boys are falling down and throwing up on the ice, as Craig and the trainer plead with Herb to stop before someone got hurt, one of the players spoke up and said that his name was Mike Eruzione and he played for the United States of America (Miracle 46:00). This illustrated a shift in attitude on the team; they weren’t individuals from different colleges anymore, they were one team playing for the U.S.A. and striving to win a gold medal.
The norming phase was marked by teamwork and can-do attitudes. Practices scenes show players encouraging each other, working together, and bonding as a team (Miracle 52:30). The camaraderie on the team was building and their performance was improving. However, Herb still needed to push his players into the final phase before the Olympics started. To do this, he challenged his players to step up and be better and he even brought in a new player that he thought would help the team (Miracle 56:15). His strategies to get his team to perform worked as seen when the leaders of the team approached Herb and asked him to send the new player home (Miracle 1:02:45). The players said that it wasn’t fair to bring in the new game because they had put in all the work and they were a family.
This marked the transition into the performing stage. Once the players saw themselves not as individuals but as families, they performed on the ice to the best of their ability. Seeing the team chemistry and relationships at Christmas (Miracle 1:05:20), on the bench, and on the ice, it was clear the team had settled into the performing phase and were ready to face their toughest opponents at the Olympics.
Miracle is a film that not only chronicles the performance of a gold medal Olympic hockey team, it also goes in depth into the coaching styles, the relationships, and the hard work, and the team chemistry that it takes to win an Olympic gold medal. Herb and Craig are two coaches who work well together and balance each other out to form a coaching staff that takes care of the complete package of a successful team. Craig is the coach who the players can go to, the one who encourages and takes care, the one who deals with the players as people, not just as players. Herb tells him this specifically, that it is his job to be friends with them take care of all the personal problems (Miracle 15:20). His role is clear when he questions Herb’s conditioning methods and expresses concern for the welfare of the players (Miracle 36:55), when he tries to stop Herb from making the players do all the sprints (Miracle 42:55), and when Craig “cleans up” the emotional mess that Herb leaves in the locker room when trying to motivate the team in between periods (Miracle 1:25:35). Craig can be classified according to Blake Mouton’s Managerial Grid (http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_73.htm.). Mouton’s model has two dimensions, concern for people and concern for performance. Coaches can be classified on both dimensions and can be “country club leaders” (high concern for people, low concern for performance), “impoverished leaders” (low concern for both people and performance), “produce or perish leaders” (low concern for people and high concern for performance), or “team leaders” (high concern for both people and performance). Craig would fall high on concern for people and somewhere in the middle on concern for performance. He was the coach who needed to be their friend, but as an Olympic coach he also cared a good deal about performance but needed to balance out Herb’s intensity to give the team a better balance.
Herb, on the other hand, seemed to only care about performance at times. He states in the opening scene that he wants to win a gold medal and he seems to stop at nothing to get there. He watched film for hours, often neglecting his wife and kids (Miracle 27:20), threw kids off the ice if they weren’t performing up to his expectations (Miracle 34:40), and punished the team by making them do sprints until they were falling over and throwing up for poor performance and lack of hustle after a game (Miracle 39:40). However, his concern for his players is also evident, especially in the second half of the movie. He kept a player on the team who was hurt because he had worked hard and earned the right to be on the team (Miracle 1:21:20), and he defended his team to the advisory board, reminding them that they were just kids and he was trying to protect them (Miracle 1:29:40). So even though Herb was highly concerned with performance, he was also middle to high on concern for players, putting him closest to the “team leader” ideal on the managerial grid.
Miracle shows on the big screen what it takes to be a successful and powerful team. A huge part of the success of the 1980 United States Hockey team came from the leadership of the coaching staff and the work they put into their players and their team to get to excel beyond anyone’s expectations.
References
Allerman, G.B. (2004). Forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. Retrieved from
http://coachleadership.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/formstormnormperform.pdf 7 February,
2011.
Ciardi, M., Gray, G. & O’ Connor, G. (2004). Miracle. United States: Disney.
Mindtools.“Blake-Mouton Managerial Grid: Balancing Task- and People-oriented leadership.”
http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_73.htm. Retrieved 7 February, 2011.
Mindtools. “The Vroom-Yetton-Jago Decision Model: Deciding how to Decide.”
http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTED_91.htm. Retrieved 7 February, 2011.
Vroom, V.H. & Yetton, P.W. (1973). Leadership and decision making. University of Pittsburgh Press:
Pittsburgh, PA.
