Youth hockey organizations are powered by people. And one of the great privileges of our work is getting to know so many of them. The officers, directors, coaches, administrators, and volunteers who give an unreasonable amount of themselves to make this game work for kids. They solve problems, absorb headaches, and routinely take on work that exceeds any reasonable mandate. They are the angels among us and every interaction should start and end with ‘thank you’.
Which makes this next part a little awkward to write.
Ironically, there’s a vulnerability that can grow alongside great leadership and administration: dependency. Not because those aforementioned people are doing anything wrong, but because they’re doing so much right. They alone possess all the knowledge, experience, and relationships required to keep the organization running smoothly. Things work so well that there may be little urgency or incentive to ask whether they would work without them.
Then, eventually, they leave. And when someone like that departs, the change can be profound. Old rhythms and norms fade. Institutional memory is lost. Relationships shift. New processes and habits are forced to emerge. Those left to grab the baton often struggle just to get running. None of that change is inherently good or bad, but it is significant and disruptive. Eventually, a new balance is struck or another wave of great people steps forward, and the cycle begins again.
That’s a difficult—and ultimately unsustainable—way for an organization to operate.
The challenge isn’t finding great people (although they’re always welcome!). It’s figuring out how to turn what great people bring into something the organization gets to keep.
One way to think about that evolution is through three phases: person-driven, process-driven and principle-driven.
Phase 1: Person-Driven
Most youth hockey organizations spend at least some of their time here. In a person-driven organization, a relatively small number of people possess a disproportionate amount of the knowledge, relationships, and responsibility required to keep the club functioning. Everyone knows who these people are. When something goes wrong, the answer is usually some version of, “Ask Jim,” “Call Sarah,” or “Linda handles everything.”
This isn’t necessarily a sign of dysfunction. In fact, person-driven organizations can be incredibly effective. A talented, passionate leader can make decisions quickly, solve problems creatively and build enormous momentum. Smaller or newer clubs, professionalized private organizations, and clubs emerging from a difficult period often naturally gravitate toward this model. Sometimes you need a few people willing to put the organization on their backs and move it forward.
The warning signs appear when competence becomes dependency. Information isn’t documented because someone already knows it. Patterns aren’t institutionalized because one person has always handled them. Other volunteers aren’t developed because it’s easier for the experienced person to simply do the job. New initiatives or projects aren’t delegated thoughtfully into healthy organizational charts, they’re simply tacked onto the swollen job descriptions of a few key people… or worse, abandoned for lack of manpower. Decisions become concentrated in increasingly smaller circles, not necessarily because anyone is seeking control, but because that’s the fastest way to get things done.
Eventually, the organization is built entirely upon its heroes. That’s when vulnerability creeps in. The longtime scheduler leaves. The president’s child graduates. The great coach moves to another organization. Suddenly, the club discovers how much knowledge belonged to the individual rather than the institution.
This is often the source of those dramatic swings between “good years” and “bad years.” The organization hasn’t created a consistent experience; it has created pockets or periods of excellence based on who happens to be involved. The goal shouldn’t be to eliminate those extraordinary people. It should be to capture what makes them extraordinary and turn individual excellence into long-term organizational strength.
Phase 2: Process-Driven
Process-driven organizations begin with a simple question: How do we make good work repeatable?
Instead of relying exclusively on institutional memory, you begin cataloging institutional knowledge. Leadership and coach onboarding gets documented. Tryout procedures become clear, repeatable, and transparent. Board responsibilities are defined, communication expectations are standardized, accountability mechanisms are codified. Parent education happens intentionally. Calendars, checklists, templates and transition documents begin replacing the annual scramble to figure everything out again every summer.
Organizations often move toward this phase after experiencing the pain of realizing they were too person-dependent. Maybe a tenured volunteer leaves and nobody knows how something works. Maybe the coaching quality/philosophy varies dramatically from team to team. Maybe the same parent complaints surface every year. Maybe staff burnout has become a serious problem because the same handful of people are constantly carrying too much.
Growth can also force this transition. A 150-player organization might be able to operate for a time with just a few proficient leaders. But at 500 players, that becomes much harder. As organizations grow, complexity grows with them. More teams, coaches, families and volunteers create more opportunities for inconsistency. What once could be handled with personal touch eventually needs structure.
At its best, process doesn’t create bureaucracy; it reduces friction. A new coach shouldn’t have to guess what the organization expects. A new board member shouldn’t need a year to understand their role. A new team manager shouldn’t need to reinvent something that 40 team managers have done before them.
Instead of inventing, people inherit. And then, ideally, they improve what they inherited and pass something better to the next person.
Process-driven organizations have made real progress. But process isn’t the end of the evolution. “That’s how we’ve always done it” can become just as dangerous as having no process at all. Policies accumulate. Checklists get longer. Procedures designed to solve a problem five years ago remain in place long after the problem has changed. Eventually, people can become more concerned with compliance than flourishing in their role.
And inevitably, organizations are forced to confront the limitation of process: policy can get you far, but it can never eliminate the need for judgment.
The most vivid example of that? When something happens that isn’t in the manual.
The Fork in the Road
Processes work wonderfully when the situation in front of you is one you’ve anticipated. But youth hockey is messy. Eventually, a situation arises where someone must use some judgement.
There is an unusual roster situation. A coach makes a questionable decision. Two organizational priorities come into conflict. A parent raises a legitimate concern that doesn’t fit neatly into an existing policy. Something happens for which there simply isn’t a prescribed or battle-tested remedy.
And it’s here— when policy shows it’s limits—where organizations reach an important fork in the road: retreat to the hero, or find another way forward?
The natural instinct is often to look back toward the hero.
“What does our president think?”
“Let’s ask the director.”
“Who has dealt with this before?”
To be clear—you should talk to those people! Experience, perspective and institutional memory are enormously valuable, and good decisions are rarely made in isolation. But the distinction is whether those voices help inform the organization’s answer or are required to provide it.
That’s the critical limitation of being merely process-driven. You can document a lot, but you can never document everything. If every situation outside the playbook requires finding the right person to make the call, consultation has become dependency. The answer once again hinges on who happens to be sitting in the chair. Change the person and you may change the answer. And just like that, you’ve circled back to being person-driven.
A lot of organizations spend a lot of time on that carousel. Find great people, support them with policy, circle back to those great people when the policy runs out, write more policy… after a few years, all you’ve got is a vacant chair and a mountain of policy written for its previous occupant.
But there is another turn at the fork—one that breaks that cycle. It may initially be the harder road, but over time it offers the possibility of something far more durable.
Instead of looking for a hero to provide the answer, the organization looks for a compass to help find it.
Phase 3: Principle-Driven
Principle-driven organizations don’t move beyond great people or great policy—they build upon them. Great people are the first building blocks. They bring talent, experience and energy. Next, great processes create consistency around what can be anticipated and insulate great people with healthy systems. Finally, shared principles provide the compass for the unknown. Those elements aren’t about replacing one with the next but layering each upon the last. People. Process. Principles.
Those principles might sound something like: Every player deserves to know what success looks like. Every coach deserves support and development. Every family deserves clear and consistent communication. Every significant decision should be defensible against our mission.
Those principles aren’t helpful if they’re merely buried in the orientation manual. They’re filters for decision-making.
A person-driven organization asks, “Who should decide?”
A process-driven organization asks, “What does the policy say?”
A principle-driven organization asks, “What does our compass tell us?”
The distinction matters. The goal isn’t to remove judgment from leadership. It’s to give that judgment something more durable than the instincts of whichever leader happens to be there. Organizations that operate this way tend to have a relatively strong sense of identity. They know what they’re trying to accomplish and spend a lot of energy aligning their personnel to that identity. And that dynamic works both ways— aligned principles don’t diminish the impact of great people, they give those people a clearer path to do their best work.
Build those compass-reading skills long enough, widely enough, and the hallmarks start to become visible all over the place. Eventually… Leadership isn’t debating the fundamental purpose of the organization every time a difficult issue arises… Coaches are operating from a common set of beliefs despite unique personalities and styles… Board members may disagree about a decision while still agreeing on the principles that should guide it… Parents and players see and feel a mission statement come to life in their daily experiences and crisis moments alike.
Consistency despite the absence of uniformity. That’s culture, baby.
Organizations Don’t Graduate
There’s an important qualifier to all of this: these aren’t permanent or absolute classifications.
You don’t become a principle-driven organization, receive a framed certificate and stay there forever. All of this is written in pencil, not ink. Organizations are constantly drifting between phases as roles, responsibilities and people change. A strong process can become outdated. A process thought to be ineffective might just need a more apt executor. A leadership transition can expose something everyone assumed was understood but was never actually documented. Rapid growth, financial pressure, facility challenges or the changing hockey landscape can all move an organization backward, force it forward, or shake loose smaller elements.
Different parts of the same organization can also exist in different phases simultaneously. Your registration process might be incredibly mature and repeatable while coach development depends almost entirely on one key expert. Your tryout process might be well documented while parent communication varies wildly from team to team. Your board might have strong governance procedures while nobody has ever articulated the principles that should guide hockey decisions.
That’s normal. Seriously.
The objective isn’t to achieve some mythical state of perfect organizational evolution. The idea is noticing where oversight or dependency exists and continually doing something about it. Just caring to ask means you’re well on your way.
Where are we dependent on a person? What does that person know that the organization should know? What should become a process? And when the process doesn’t have an answer, what principles should guide us? Are we orienting the next wave of leaders toward those principles? Are we surviving or progressing?
That reflection exercise never really ends.
Youth hockey will always need heroes. Volunteer organizations depend on people willing to give more time, energy and expertise than anyone could reasonably expect of them. Those people should be celebrated. (Thank you again to those folks!)
But sustainability isn’t about finding an endless supply of heroes. It’s about building an organization that learns. Great volunteers should leave behind more than an empty chair. Leadership transitions should compound positive momentum. Difficult decisions should leave the organization a little clearer about who it is and what it believes for the time spent looking at the compass. People will change. Problems will change. The organization should be better prepared each time they do.
That’s the work: people, process, principles—and then doing it all over again.
