Sriharsha Sriram

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The Barefoot Coach

Sriharsha

February 6, 2025

Leadership Coaching, Life coaching

What The Barefoot Coach Taught Me About Leading Teams Through Change

Early in my career, I noticed that the Scrum Master was one of the most misunderstood roles on a team. These days, I would say the same thing about the word coach. Whether it is a sports coach, a life coach or an Agile coach, the role rarely gets fully understood, sometimes even by the coaches themselves.

I recently read The Barefoot Coach by Paddy Upton, and while it is written about cricket, I found myself reading it as a book about leading any team through real change.

What Indian cricket learned about specialization

The book opens by drawing a clear line between facilitating, coaching and mentoring, and it makes the case that the best coaches lead by serving the team rather than directing it. Before 2008, coaching in Indian cricket was largely instruction based. That changed when specialized roles, batting, bowling, fielding, fitness and mental fitness coaches, were introduced.

The lesson translates directly to transformation work. One person cannot coach every dimension of a team’s growth, whether that team is on a cricket pitch or in the middle of a business
transformation. Specialization, and knowing when to bring in the right kind of support, is what actually lifts performance. It is also worth noting how recent the idea of a mental fitness coach was in that world. Mindset coaching is still catching up to technical coaching in a lot of high performance environments, corporate ones included.

A few lessons that apply well beyond sport

• Failure teaches more than winning does. Many of the team’s most important lessons came
from matches they lost, not the ones they won. What mattered was how the team responded,
not whether they avoided failure altogether.
• Coaching only works when someone is ready to be coached. Several of the team’s earlier
coaches were more instructive than they were coaching oriented, and player growth stayed
limited as a result. The same is true in organizations. You cannot coach someone into
readiness. You can only meet them once they are there.
• Self-learning beats spoon-feeding. Bringing in outside experts to share experience, and then
letting the team draw its own conclusions, builds far more durable learning than handing people
a prepared answer.

What this means for leading a team through transformation

A few threads from the book map closely onto what I see in transformation work. Everyone, from the newest hire to the most senior leader, needs an equal voice, and real leadership often means trusting the judgment of the people closest to the work over your own instinct. Discipline works best when it is team owned rather than imposed from above. Culture holds a team together through losses, not just wins, and humility keeps people grounded once they start succeeding. Teams that are trusted to organize their own way of working, rather than follow a rigid playbook, tend to perform better and adapt faster. And transparency, telling people where they stand directly instead of letting them hear it secondhand, is what builds the trust a team needs to move through uncertainty together.

The closing thought

The Barefoot Coach is not really a cricket book. It is a book about what it takes to build a team that can handle pressure, adapt under uncertainty and trust each other enough to perform when it matters. Those are exactly the conditions every transformation leader is trying to create. If you lead people through change in any capacity, agile, executive, or otherwise, it is worth the read.