What is the biggest challenge when working with a performance coach?
You have no clear way to measure their impact on your team’s performance.
That’s why the very first step, before hiring a performance coach, is to clearly define the outcomes you expect from them.
Be specific. Be concrete. Avoid vague goals that leave too much room for interpretation.
And finally, make sure you agree on the metrics that will demonstrate whether their work is actually making a difference.
If you can’t measure a performance coach’s impact, you have no way of knowing whether you’re making a sound investment or simply wasting your money.
1st step: Discovery call
This step is essential if you want a fruitful collaboration and a strong foundation for your partnership.
When everyone is aligned around the same goals and expectations are clear to everyone, success becomes much easier.
And yet, in esports, most CEOs and general managers skip this step.
Why?
Because it’s uncomfortable, and because you don’t know which questions to ask. After all, the role of a performance coach is still largely misunderstood.
Let me be clear: it is the performance coach’s responsibility to guide you through the discovery call so you can focus entirely on expressing your needs.
It is not the client’s job to understand exactly what a performance coach does, nor to figure out how to run the discovery process. That’s our job.
Typical needs of a Tier 1 esports organization
The organization believed it had provided the team with everything they needed.
Yet the team was still falling short of expectations.
Here are the questions they wanted answered:
- We can’t identify what’s missing for our players to consistently perform at their full potential, especially during finals.
- Why do some players fail to correct mistakes they already understand, or have even identified themselves?
- Why do teams stay stuck on the same issues instead of solving them quickly?
- What conditions need to be in place for a team to solve problems on the fly?
- How can we permanently resolve conflicts or prevent them altogether?
- Which metrics actually reflect the health of a team? (Beyond the obvious ones, such as match results.)
- What is the most effective way for the team to communicate?
- How can we anticipate tension before it escalates?
- How can we assess and monitor our players’ mental well-being?
- How do we keep the team hungry and prevent complacency?
- How do we help players overcome fear before high-stakes matches?
- How do we build consistency across the team?
- How do we train the staff to handle these issues even after the performance coach is gone?
2nd step: Translate your needs into performance drivers
Once you’ve expressed your needs as clearly and precisely as possible, my job is to translate them into a set of observable, measurable, and assessable performance drivers.
Each performance driver is defined in a way that allows both its implementation and its impact to be evaluated objectively.
Let me give you an example using the first item from the previous list:
– We can’t identify what’s missing for our players to consistently perform at their full potential, especially during finals.
To perform consistently under pressure, a team must satisfy several key performance drivers:
Notice how each of these performance drivers is easy to observe and easy to evaluate.
Each one has a simple yes-or-no answer. There’s no room for ambiguity or subjective interpretation.
We immediately know whether the standard has been met.
- Are my players fighting in scrims regardless of the game state? Yes or no.
- Is everyone doing their part when the team faces adversity? Yes or no.
- Is every obstacle reframed as a collective problem that requires a collective solution? Yes or no.
- Are players focusing exclusively on what they can control and ignoring everything else? Yes or no.
- Are players still willing to fight, both in and out of the game, when things get tough? Yes or no.
3rd step: Define deadlines
One element is missing from almost every professional project in esports: deadlines.
Most people will tell you they’ll do something or deliver something, but they rarely commit to a specific deadline.
Why does this matter?
Because without a deadline, priorities quickly become blurred. You’re forced to react to the endless stream of emergencies that define life in esports, and we all know there is never a shortage of those.
A deadline creates commitment. It means accepting that a result must be delivered on time and doing whatever is necessary to make that happen.
That’s why I don’t just translate your needs into measurable performance drivers. Every single one is assigned a clear deadline.
4th step: Set up a monitoring system
Being able to observe and evaluate my impact is one thing.
Being able to do it quickly and effortlessly is essential if you’re a CEO or General Manager.
As a decision-maker, your time is too valuable to spend chasing updates or wondering whether meaningful progress is being made.
I’m fully aware of those constraints.
That’s why I maintain a dashboard that is updated every week.
You can access it at any time to instantly see where we stand, what has been accomplished, and what still needs attention.
Using the same example as before, one section of the dashboard would look like this:
Of course, this is only a small excerpt.
The actual dashboard includes every relevant performance driver and metric needed to give you a complete, accurate, and up-to-date view of the project’s progress.
5th step: Weekly meetings
Why do so many esports projects eventually fail?
Because the people responsible for making the most important decisions rarely have the information they need to make them.
Week after week, the team struggles. All you hear is, “We’re working hard to fix it.”
But what does that actually mean?
- What has been identified?
- What has already been tried?
- What’s working?
- What’s not?
- Where is the team stuck?
- What should happen next?
Without clear answers to those questions, it’s almost impossible to make informed decisions or provide meaningful support.
I’ve seen this happen time and time again.
By the time upper management gets involved, the team has often accumulated too many unresolved issues, and the season is already too far gone. At that point, the conversation shifts from “How do we fix this?” to “How do we minimize the damage?”
To prevent that from happening, we schedule a 30-minute alignment meeting every week with the organization’s decision-makers.
During this meeting, I explain:
- What I’m currently working on.
- What outcomes we expect from each intervention.
- How we’ll determine whether those interventions are working.
- What risks or blockers have emerged since our last meeting.
Because every objective has clear deadlines, measurable performance drivers, milestones, and a live dashboard, you’ll know immediately if something is falling behind schedule.
These meetings are also an opportunity for you to share your observations, raise new concerns, and identify priorities that may require additional attention.
The objective is simple: you’ll never have to wonder what I’m doing or whether my work is creating value.
You won’t have to chase me for updates or hold me accountable. I come to you with the data, the progress, and the next steps.
This gives your leadership team the clarity needed to make fast, informed decisions. The kind of decisions high-performance environments demand.
Last step: Build the knowledge base
The hidden challenge that prevents esports organizations from improving over time
Why does it often feel like esports organizations face the same problems split after split?
Because valuable knowledge is constantly being lost.
When a roster changes, it’s common for coaches and support staff to change as well.
As a result, much of what was learned throughout the season disappears with them.
The next staff starts with limited context, relying on their own experience and assumptions rather than on a structured record of what has already been tested, what worked, what failed, and why.
Over time, this makes organizational learning extremely difficult.
Instead of building on proven knowledge, each new project has to rediscover many of the same lessons, slowing progress and making it easier for familiar problems to reappear.
A key concept that is missing in esports
In most mature industries, organizations don’t rely on memory alone.
They build knowledge systems.
Every important lesson is documented. Every successful process is preserved. Every mistake becomes a learning opportunity instead of something that has to be rediscovered months later.
Knowledge is captured, shared, and continuously expanded so the organization grows stronger with every project instead of starting from scratch each season.
That’s why I maintain a knowledge base that is updated every week and made accessible to the organization’s decision-makers.
Every identified issue is documented.
Every intervention is explained.
Every result is tracked.
Every successful solution is recorded so it can be reproduced whenever similar situations arise.
Over time, this knowledge base becomes far more than a project report.
It becomes the organization’s operational memory.
It allows new coaches and staff members to understand the team’s history much faster.
It dramatically reduces the time spent rediscovering previously solved problems.
It helps decision-makers understand why certain decisions worked while others failed.
It creates consistency, even when players or staff members change.
And most importantly, it allows every future project to start from a stronger foundation than the previous one.
Organizations that improve the fastest are rarely those with the biggest budgets.
They’re the ones that learn the fastest.
While others are forced to relearn the same lessons every split, your organization keeps building on proven knowledge instead of repeating the past.
A concrete example of the value of a knowledge base
During my most recent 7-week engagement:
- 49 unique performance issues were identified.
- 43 were fully resolved.
- 2 were resolved but required continued reinforcement.
- 1 was only partially addressed.
- 3 were intentionally left untouched because they were not priorities.
Managing this many issues in such a short period of time would have been nearly impossible without a structured, actionable knowledge base.
Because I rely on this approach throughout every project, the organization benefits from it as well.
By the end of the engagement, the organization didn’t just have a stronger team.
It also had a documented framework explaining what it takes to build, maintain, and continuously improve a high-performance environment.
Additional information about me and my approach
My approach is fully autonomous. I do not require additional support or resources from the organization to deliver the outcomes and deliverables described above.
All one-on-one sessions with players are strictly confidential.
Team sessions may be recorded for quality assurance purposes. Whenever a session is recorded, all participants are informed in advance.
How to contact me for business opportunities
If you want your organization to truly understand what it takes to build and sustain a high-performance environment, and if you’re convinced your roster should be achieving more than it currently is, let’s have a conversation.
You can send a DM on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/Joseph_NguyenJV
Or you can send me an email: giau-nguyen@nguyen-mindset.com
Testimonials are also available after fruitful initial contact.