CWA Blog Archive-Building Your Team's Performance And Cooperation With Some Simple Activities

Building Your Team's Performance And Cooperation With Some Simple Activities

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Written by Bix Firer and Pat Brehm, this article argues that establishing buy-in and cooperation from young climbers must go beyond simply setting rules and reactively enforcing them. Instead, a program's structure should be built on a foundation of activities and participant-created expectations that promote cooperation and give youth climbers agency over their own progress and development. Doing so creates a programmatic environment that keeps climbers engaged while promoting their independence, and holds them accountable to their peers and themselves rather than just to their coach, which ultimately makes keeping climbers focused much easier for coaches. The article's central framework for building cohesion and accountability is catering activities to help a group develop together, using Tuckman's stages of group development as a road map. With this model as a guide, coaches can build simple activities into their practices that promote individual and group cooperation, adapted depending on the group's stage of development (the text continues into specific activities mapped to Tuckman's stages). The throughline is that building young climbers' performance and cooperation is best achieved not through top-down rules and reactive enforcement but through intentionally designed activities and participant-created expectations that foster agency, independence, peer accountability, and group cohesion, guided by Tuckman's stages of group development. Because rules alone, imposed and reactively enforced, don't generate genuine buy-in, the authors advocate a foundational shift: structuring programs around cooperation-promoting activities and expectations the participants help create. This gives youth climbers agency over their own development, which increases engagement and independence, and shifts accountability from just the coach to peers and themselves, a more powerful and sustainable dynamic that also eases the coach's job of maintaining focus. Using Tuckman's well-known stages of group development (forming, storming, norming, performing) as a road map, coaches can select simple activities appropriate to where their group is, deliberately fostering the group's cohesion and cooperation over time. For coaches, the article offers both a philosophy, build cooperation and accountability through agency and participant-created expectations rather than imposed rules, and a practical framework, Tuckman's stages, for choosing activities that develop the group together, ultimately producing more engaged, independent, mutually accountable young climbers and more manageable, effective practices.

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Written by Bix Firer and Pat Brehm, this piece argues youth climbers' cooperation comes not from imposed rules and reactive enforcement but from activities and participant-created expectations that foster agency, independence, and peer accountability. Using Tuckman's stages of group development as a road map, coaches can build simple activities that develop the group together and ease practice management.