MANAGEMENT
MASTER PLAN
How to Launch a Leadership Team
Because you can only do so much at one time and do it well, it’s smart to build a back-up team of trained helpers to conduct certain classroom activities and do basic tasks for the school. One way of accomplishing this is through a leadership team.
A Leadership Team is a group of your best Black Belt Club members that enroll in a special program where you’ll teach them to skills that have to do with working with students and being a school advocate.
Before you start your Leadership Team, you’ll want to decide what your qualifications for participation will be, what they’ll be required to do, what if anything you’ll charge, and when you’ll train them.
Qualifications to Join the Leadership Team
We called our Adult Leadership Team a SWAT (Super Winning Attitude Team) Team and our Junior Leadership Team a STORM Team(Super Team of Role Models). You can give it any title you want. A good title is HIT Team, which stands for High-Intensity Team.
The Leadership Team is the most prestigious of all programs. The Leadership Team has very specific qualifications.
Qualifications
You have to be a Black Belt Club member
You have to have good personality skills, good people skills You have to be a good role model for the other students You must hold a rank of Green belt or higher (six months)
Requirements
Must train consistently in your own classes
Must commit to assisting during an assigned class to help other students 2x week Must attend Leadership Team Training Class
Training Includes:
Communication Skills
How to teach the schools’ skills and drills
How to provide students with feedback
How to motivate students
How to meet and greet
How to seek out the shy student and engage them in conversation
How to back the instructor up
How to work as a team with the instructor
Our SWAT Team members were ages 14 & up; Our STORM Team members were ages 7-13.
*Even if you don’t charge a dollar for your Leadership Team program, it’s a smart idea to have each team member sign a new membership agreement or an additional one stating that they are enrolling in the Leadership team and that spells out the requirements and the training your offering them.
Required Duties of the Leadership Team
These duties can vary based upon what your needs are for your school. In my schools, our main focus with the teams was to teach them how to run each segment of class and be an effective team player and coach to the students.
Then, based on their individual skills and age, we cast them into certain roles. For example, the strongest team members could start class and run a safe, yet energy-packed warm-up; other members were partners when we had an odd number of students; still, others were great as 5-minute private lesson coaches for students who missed class or were having challenges with one particular technique.
We taught all team members to pay close attention to the head instructor. If the instructor is demoing or doing the techniques with the class, then the Leadership Team was taught to do “wandering corrections. “ If the head instructor started to wander and make corrections the Leadership Team members would position themselves in front of the class or with one in the back in a turn was anticipated.
This way the students always had a model to watch as they were learning.
Leadership Team members are taught valuable lessons such as how to properly correct students, use eye contact, a smile, state corrections in the positive, and are taught to be great motivators. Each of our schools have 30 member teams which also taught free private lessons to our students 2 days a week!
What to Charge for Leadership Team
You could easily charge for your Leadership Team program if it’s designed much like your other courses and is very structured. Some schools have a full-blown program with the end result being to help the members open a school of their own.
Others really want to make it a prestigious program that helps reinforce life skills and allows the students to fine-tune their people skills while helping others at the same time.
Depending on your goals for your program and how much training you’ll be providing you may charge a next to nothing, or increase tuition by $20.00 a month, or even several thousand dollars. It’s really up to you.
We didn’t charge for our program, but did have the members buy their Leadership Team uniforms. We gave them patches at no cost. Our main purpose was to provide excellent customer service to our members, while creating better martial artists who were skilled at their craft and enjoyed giving back to the arts.
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When Will You Train the Team?
Before you can start your Leadership Team you’ll need to decide what the training schedule will be, especially since each member must commit to making it.
Since part of our Leadership Team would be in on Saturdays teaching 15 min. private lessons and a good majority of them loved the Saturday fitness class, it was obvious to us that our best choice would be on Saturday afternoon at 1:00 PM when all other activities were done.
The first month we launched our program, we held Leadership Team class every Saturday. After that, we held it just one Saturday a month so that they’d continue to make progress.
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This lesson was designed to give you an overview on how to get started. If you’d like more information, the MATA web site has lots of Leadership Team information.