ideas requested for incentives/rewards for improvement

[kathyt cupcake]

I thought about attaching this to the 2007 thread on collegiate teams so mods feel free to do so if you want.

My team is considering the idea of :
"Team-Subsidized Competition Awards
For the purpose of encouraging and supporting your advancement in competition, the team will be rewarding couples who demonstrate significant improvement."

- couples who final for the first time in open or gold get 3 free privates, final in silver get 2 free privates, top 3 in newcomer/bronze get 1 free private

I have the following objections to this idea:

1) it is very very difficult if not impossible for single girls to place when dancing TBA at competitions so this is inherently unfair given the fewguys:manygirls ratio on the team at all levels
2) improvement is not necessarily reflected by competitive results eg. you can have people who start out being not so good at dance who improve a lot from where they started bc they work hard and practice, but even then they might not be able to place depending on the competition or bc they don't have a partner
3) the actual competitiveness of each competition varies (usually relative to the size of the comp) and yet the awards are the same eg. NYU syllabus challenge was limited to 200 competitors vs DCDI/MIT were giant comps
4) the competitiveness of the different styles is varies-- eg#1 anyone could enter open rhythm or smooth which is almost always a final (even gold is often a final/semi) and place last and then they would get 3 free privates?
eg#2. gold smooth and rhythm are nowhere near as competitive (at least on the east coast) as silver latin/standard and yet you get a better reward for placing in them
5) I think 2 and 3 free lessons is too big of an award, the equivalent of $150-240? I would care less if it was either 1 lesson or if it was free entry into the next competition
6) The reward system encourages dancing down at least once to get the free lessons from that level

Obviously some of my objections could be addressed by including specifics like having rewards only if there's more than a final etc but I'd like to get feedback from you guys on how we might create a more fair reward/encouragement system for improvement-- ideally something where girls who work hard aren't disadvantaged and improvement rather than winning is rewarded. I've certainly seen some people work really really hard and get a lot better at dancing from where they started, but who still aren't going to place at big comps.

I would really appreciate any suggestions or ideas or feedback!

 

[Chris Stratton]

As a possibly very different approach, something that can potentially work well on a college team is a supervised practice / help session kind of arrangement. Basically, instead of the compressed package of knowledge that is a typical private lesson (which may or may not then get practiced enough to be applied), you get a floor that can accommodate many couples, and one or two coaches for a couple of hours. People practice, get 5-10 minutes of help, practice that for a half hour, get more help, etc. If the coaches are good about keeping people moving between the two modes (and reluctant to help those who sit around or talk when not being helped) it can work pretty well. This is both because it helps structure practice and keep it productive, and also because being able to get full dollar benefit from a 45-minute lesson is actually a skill that may take a few years of experience to learn.

 

[ChaChaMama]

I think it is important to think about what the goals are of the program and articulate them as specifically as possible.

-To increase the overall placings of the team, especially at the highest levels? (That seems to be the way the rough draft of the plan is set up.)
-To give individual members incentives to work harder?
-To build team unity and solidarity while increasing skills?


If it were 100% up to me, I would probably do something to get EVERYONE to pull for the team, in addition to offering incentives to individuals.

Something like this (very rough idea off top of head)
When the team gets up to 200 points, we hire a coach for a morning of workshops and an afternoon of privates.
-1 point for every person who attends 1 lesson and 2 practices in a week (or whatever is reasonable).
-1 point for every couple who makes it one round further than they did at the last comp. (That way, a couple that got cut in the 1st round of newcomer in their 1st comp, and makes it to the QF the next comp, still gets acknowledged for improvement.)
-1 point every time someone contributes 1 hour to team business (e.g., if the team hosts a comp)

Team will also give semi-private lessons to the top 8-10 individual point earners.

 

[Another Elizabeth]

Something like this (very rough idea off top of head)
When the team gets up to 200 points, we hire a coach for a morning of workshops and an afternoon of privates.
-1 point for every person who attends 1 lesson and 2 practices in a week (or whatever is reasonable).
-1 point for every couple who makes it one round further than they did at the last comp. (That way, a couple that got cut in the 1st round of newcomer in their 1st comp, and makes it to the QF the next comp, still gets acknowledged for improvement.)
-1 point every time someone contributes 1 hour to team business (e.g., if the team hosts a comp)

Team will also give semi-private lessons to the top 8-10 individual point earners.

These sound like fabulous ideas to me, and have the incentives geared much more toward what you actually want to encourage. You might want to also give a point for couples that move up a level, to help minimize the incentives to sandbag.

I also would recommend trying to set a point threshold for individuals to earn the semi-privates (or whatever you choose for an individual reward), rather than making it the top 8-10, to encourage individual achievement instead of competition with others on the team. The downside, of course, is that you don't know exactly what it might cost. You could say that you're going to put in a certain pool of "scholarship" money and divide it among those who get however many points you set for the threshold, though.

 

[latingal]

I think there are some very good ideas here on incenting what it is you really want to encourage on your team.

Just one comment, just like there are many things out of an individual's control when it come to placements (i.e. subjective view of the judges), I would try to stay with objective targets in your program as much as possible so it is as fair as it can be.

 

[ireniecat]

If your team is really close and people are supportive of each other, why not let everyone vote on who they feel is "most improved"? You can have multiple categories for levels (newcomer, bronze, silver, etc) and styles (latin, smooth, etc). If you have regular team practices and travel to competitions together, the people on the team themselves will be able to best assess who has made the most progress in a given semester. This way it's based within the team, and not on competition results. You can announce the results of the vote at semi-formal or something and make a party out of it.

 

[kathyt cupcake]

Thanks for all the ideas and suggestions so far, it's really helpful.

Some responses:
@Chris Stratton-- two of our three coaches do in fact run a portion of their group lessons in the way you've described-- with everyone doing their routine and then the coach walks around and give pointers.

@CCM-- I like your idea about building cohesiveness by working toward a group goal rather than just the typical me-me-me individual thing we often have going on

@Another Elizabeth-- thanks for the mod suggested- it totally makes sense to not encourage within the team competition.

@latingal- I would really like to be able to think of more objective criteria to reward ppl for either working hard on their dancing or for the team. I think one of the things we struggle with is how to figure out what kind of behavior to reward-- on the one hand we would like to encourage ppl to stay with the team over time and have higher level (prechamp) dancers around. And we have some ppl who practice hard on their own and are great dancers, but they don't give any of their time to the team except to go to lessons. On the other hand, we also have ppl who are not advanced dancers but who have a much greater commitment to building/supporting the team and spend lots of hours working for the team and we'd like to recognize that too, regardless of whether or not they are winning at comps. (Yes we also have a few ppl who are both committed to working on their own dancing and to helping the team.)

Would it be a good/bad idea to say have the coaches pick out a handful of ppl (wouldn't have to be couples) twice a semester as most improved and reward those ppl with semi-privates? I'm not sure our coaches would be unbiased towards the ppl who are taking privates with them already.

@ireniecat-- I'm not sure I would describe our team as really close and supportive- probably more as diffuse and loose knit (most ppl are close to a few ppl), with lots of small cliques united by a common interest in dancing. The way lessons are run, there isn't always a lot of interaction between levels during the year, and probably <20% of the team goes to the competitions (often due to other time commitments, dislike of competing, no partner, etc).
We do run some mentoring sessions with more advanced-beginner groups, so some ppl do know more of the team than others.