Everything you wanted to know about the DAL360
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What is the DAL360?
An athlete leadership 360 feedback is a process in which an individual’s leadership skills and behavior are evaluated by multiple sources, including their team captains, fellow teammates, coaches, and sometimes even other members of the athletics department or a team’s stakeholders.
The goal of this feedback is to provide an athlete with a comprehensive understanding of their strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement, from a variety of perspectives.
This type of feedback can be vital to a team’s performance because it allows athletes to identify blind spots and areas for development, which can ultimately improve their ability to lead and motivate their team. It also promotes self-awareness and can help athletes understand how their actions affect others, which can lead to better communication, collaboration, and overall team functioning.
Beyond sports teams’ performance, DAL’s athlete leadership 360 feedback is an opportunity to give your athletes a chance to develop skills valuable in their lives and careers post-athletics.
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How It Works
1. The coach sends us a roster
2. We send out custom survey links to the athletes
3. The athletes take ~15 minutes to complete the survey
4. We aggregate the data and create custom reports for selected athletes
5. We can send out the reports directly to the athletes, or send them only to the coach, who would then distribute after reviewing
6. We provide an easy roadmap that allows coaches to maximize leader development for each athlete
7. We are your continued partner in implementing your plan, here to offer feedback, resources, and other guidance that may be needed
*Please note that all survey responses are confidential, and results will be displayed in aggregate to identify themes; no individual responses will be shared unless anonymized first. In addition, no traceable athlete data or personally-identifying information of any participant will be shared and we will not share any data with any 3rd parties.
For the leadership factors where athletes are rated just using numbers, each athlete will see their own self-rating score and the average score of all the others’ ratings.
Our report does include free-response feedback, unless you opt out. If you don’t opt out of the qualitative feedback feature (for instance, an open-ended “do you have any feedback for this person about their leadership style?”), we do not distribute that directly to the athlete right away.
Instead, we aggregate those qualitative answers and put them in a report for the coaches’ eyes only. If the coach approves, we can disseminate that feedback to the athletes, but we won’t do that until the coach has reviewed the feedback themself first. That is, it would not appear in the personalized report for the athlete, and it would be the coaches’ discretion for how to handle distributing the feedback.
Check out our example open-ended feedback report in addition to the numerical data shown on page 14 of this sample report.
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How Long Does It Take?
The overall time can vary widely, but a good estimate is about 15 minutes for the survey portion and another 30 minutes for the individual athlete reflection.
The process is divided into two parts: the survey where the athlete rates themself, the captains, & other teammates, and the second part involves reflecting on the findings in each report. The first part will depend on your team’s size and whether you have opted into the open feedback feature, but it shouldn’t take more than 20 minutes to complete.
The second part can vary a lot depending on the amount of time the coach wants to spend on individualized debriefing, as well as how much encouragement the athlete receives to really spend time with the worksheets in the report. At a minimum, we believe coaches should ask their athletes to spend at least 30 minutes with their report, going through the worksheets on their own.
However, you will find the best results if you or your staff manage to sit with each athlete and go over the data. Depending on your team size, the time commitment for the coaching staff could be pretty high, though on a per-athlete basis, it might only add another 30 minutes to the athlete’s schedule.
We provide coaches with a workbook that can be useful in deciding how to structure debrief sessions, but we acknowledge this can be time-consuming. If you are interested in having one of us come to your school or videoconference in to help with the debriefs, this is a service we offer.
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What’s on the DAL360?
We curated ten research-validated measures for the DAL360. They are either based on behaviors or mindsets, both of which are actionable for developing leaders to work on right away. You can see a short list of the variables we include on page 14 of the sample report, or check out more detailed descriptions of the variables on the first 13 pages.
We are able to customize your 360 report for an additional fee. For instance, perhaps you don’t want to measure some of the variables above — we can take them out. Or, perhaps your team has a set of core values (e.g., courage, competitiveness, etc.) and you want to measure those as well — we can add those in. Contact us to discuss those details, as pricing will depend on the extent of the modifications.
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Questions, interested in learning more? Check out our pricing page, FAQs section, contact us, or sign up today!
And don’t forget about our (always-updating) free resources page.
