Preparing Your Student-Athletes for Life Post-Competition
Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, eventually we become “former” student-athletes.
It’s important to every coach and administrator that their student-athletes are well prepared to pursue lives of purpose and passion after graduation, and every day spent as a member of a team is one that will make student-athletes attractive to future employers.
Anecdotally, we know that employers show a strong preference for hiring student-athletes because they assume they’re getting future employees who know how to work as part of a team, persevere, manage their time, and seek/respond to feedback.
In addition, studies have shown that an overwhelming percentage of women who reach the C-suite were former student-athletes (94%!). Despite that, in interviews most student-athletes struggle to articulate the value they bring to future employers; instead many assume that they are somehow “less than” their peers who may have instead invested many hours in research labs or extracurriculars.
What if a student-athlete could share in an interview an understanding of their relative strengths as a leader/teammate, offer insight into the specific ways in which they have worked to develop those behaviors, and then suggest the ways in which they might positively impact their future colleagues accordingly?
Enter the DAL360. The DAL360 measures a series of leadership behaviors that have been research-validated to positively affect team effectiveness. When a student-athlete receives a DAL360 report, they get a personalized snapshot of how they are perceived by their teammates (all feedback is anonymously aggregated) so they can quickly identify their relative strengths – as well as opportunities for continued growth – as a leader.
The report then additionally provides them a guide for self-reflection, as well as a roadmap for practicing and honing all of the behaviors measured. This insight would then allow a student-athlete to communicate in any interview – professional, medical or other graduate school, research fellowship – where/how they can most meaningfully contribute to a team, and where/how they have intentionally grown those skills. This makes the “tell me about a weakness” question a piece of cake!
Our student-athletes will go on to positively affect their communities – personal and professional – for the remainder of their lives.
The DAL360 helps to prepare them accordingly by providing them affirmation of the ways in which they are already poised to enhance future organizations, and the reassurance that they have grown in the areas which may not have come as naturally.
