The Kerry-Edwards ticket had just been announced last week when participants in Poynter’s summer fellowship program got a shot at documenting one of the Democrats’ first joint campaign appearances.
The summer fellows brought back images that were creative, candid, and transporting, among other things. But my job was not so much to critique the photographs as to coach these young photographers in the process of visual reporting.
And to talk about coaching.
What is it that coaches do? Let’s take a quick look at four really good ones, only one of whom (to my knowledge) knows much about photography.
Red Auerbach ranks as the fourth winningest coach in the history of the National Basketball Association. He led the Boston Celtics to nine NBA titles and coached some of the best players ever to set foot on the famed parquet floor of the Boston Garden.
I loved Red’s style. He was an in-your-face motivator whose trademark cigar must have rendered some of his encounters with players especially pungent. He pushed his players to be all that they could be by stressing discipline and sound fundamentals.
Bill Russell, the legendary cornerstone of that Red-led Celtic dynasty of the ’60s, went on to become an outstanding player-coach whose hallmark was leadership by example.
To draw on more recent NBA history, consider the man known as “the coach’s coach,” Larry Brown of the Detroit Pistons. Brown inspired a team without a superstar in a shocking upset of the star-studded Los Angeles Lakers to win this year’s NBA championship.
How did he do it? Masterful leadership of moment-by-moment execution by five guys who had learned to work as a team.
Then there’s Mike Lang.
Mike is director of photography at the Herald Tribune in Sarasota, Fla. He has coached his staff through some enormously challenging changes and transitions in a converged newsroom. He has also devoted lots of his time to coaching young photojournalists on his staff and those in the Poynter summer fellowship program.
Once a fixer known for his ability to correct or salvage especially tough situations, Mike has blossomed into an effective coach who is focused on helping his colleagues get it right from the get-go.
For Mike, becoming a coach has been a process requiring self-confidence and humility. The qualities that get you noticed on the street as a photographer — a personal commitment to excellence, a reputation as one of the best and brightest — are not so easily instilled in others.
The transition from player to coach — or from photographer to photo editor — must begin with a recognition that the rewards for each are different.
If you’re still thinking like a player on the court (or a photographer on the street), finding success as a coach will remain an elusive goal. Until you let go of your glory days, it will be difficult to build your confidence and competence as someone who draws satisfaction from the achievement of others.
A common pressure felt by many new managers is a compulsion to know everything — or at least to give that impression. Since nobody knows everything, such a pursuit renders the new coach feeling — and looking — horribly insecure.
Living with this anxiety may make them grudging, secretive, and authoritarian with staff.
One of the greatest challenges for the coach is trusting the photographer to make good decisions in the field during coverage.
“Coaching is about teaching and letting go,” according to Monica Moses, a former Poynter Institute faculty member who is now deputy managing editor at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. All too often leaders find they can’t let go and can’t share authority and vision.
A photo coach is not always a person with a formal title but is an individual who respects photographers, someone who sees them as more than just “shooters.” The photo coach is the arbiter of photographic quality within the organization. A coach does frame-by-frame editing, and represents the entire daily photographic report and not just the staff-generated work.
The idea is not for the coach to know everything — or even to know more than the people working for her. What’s essential is knowing what it takes to help others do their best work.
CORRECTION: A sidebar originally published with this article did not attribute several passages to a March 1999 article by Poynter’s Jill Geisler. Excerpts from Geisler’s article were used without attribution in a document created later that year by Poynter’s Kenny Irby for possible use as a seminar handout. That document was the basis for a significant portion of the sidebar. When we discovered that the passage required -– and did not have –- attribution, the sidebar was removed from Poynter Online.
Irby’s sidebar fell short of Poynter’s standards for truth and accuracy. We trace responsibility for what happened partly to the writer and partly to Poynter’s lack of clear procedures for handling attribution in — and publication of — handouts created for seminars. We will change our procedures and revise our ethics guidelines accordingly.
