Archives for July 2017

Your Dream Team

We love movies like Remember the Titans, Hoosiers, and Miracle, because we see a group of individuals come together to become something special!

Coaches dream of one day leading a selfless team, with a strong work ethic, and a relentless desire to be great.

So stop focusing so much time and energy on your latest long term plan.

Stop with all the Xs and Os strategizing or developing the latest business strategy.

Stop with the lengthy mission statements that you post on your website or the team mottos you put on your t-shirts.

Start doing the things necessary today to build a team, school, or business that lives a mission focused on serving others.

Leaders in sports, academics, and business attend clinics, conferences, and workshops in search of new drills, activities, or strategies to help give them the edge.

But if you look at the great coaches, school administrators, and CEOs you understand it is not about Xs and Os, curriculum, or a business plan. Success for a team, school or business comes down to culture.

A culture that puts people over wins and losses.

A culture that puts people over academic test scores.

A culture that puts people over profits.

Greg Popovich and the San Antonio Spurs

Just look at Greg Popovich and the success he has had with the San Antonio Spurs. They have become one of the model organizations in the sporting world, because their primary focus is culture. Everyone wants to be like them.

Listen to what Theo Epstein, president of the Chicago Cubs, had to say about the Spurs. “They’re a great model because they are conscious of creating a culture where players opt in for the greater good and sacrifice personal interest in order to win, in order to have the right rapport with each other. They value the same things, even after winning, and that can be hard. They’re open. They talk about winning. Popovich is intentional with everything he does, and the players hold each other accountable.”

INTENTIONAL….

Their culture is no accident.

As a basketball coach I spent years focused on the Xs and Os, conditioning, and skill development.

But I realized more and more every year a hard truth.

None of that matters if your culture sucks.

Do people enjoy showing up?

Do people trust leadership?

Do people care for each other?

Are people committed to the success of the program or business?

Are people given opportunities for growth?

If you want to tap into the intrinsic motivation of your people, you need to have an environment in which people have freedom, share a common vision, and feel supported on their journey.

Building Culture Must Be An Intentional Everyday Thing

As a basketball coach, if you believe shooting 3s is really important you practice it everyday.

If you believe conditioning is really important you work on it everyday.

You practice what you value the most.

What proportion of our time and resources do we commit to building culture?

Every year I hoped for a positive culture, but most years if the team was negative, mentally weak, or lacked chemistry I would make excuses.

“We had no leaders.”

“Our players were just to lazy this year.”

“I inherited a losing culture.”

We did lack leadership, but did I spend time and energy to develop leaders in my team?

We did not have a great work ethic, but did I work to develop the work ethic of my people?

Culture takes time to develop, but did I prioritize the time and resources needed to transform the culture?

The answer was NO.

My wish was to build a culture of individuals who served the mission of our team over their own selfish desires.

I wanted to help young men grow to become better people not just better basketball players.

But I had to start becoming intentional about it.

Being intentional requires you to…

Model it.

Talk about it.

Read about it.

Discuss it.

Write about it.

Train it.

-J.P. Nebun

A Selfish Culture Stems from a Lack of Leadership

Over the last few months I have had the opportunity to talk with many coaches, some of them are among the top high school and college coaches in the country.

And in most of these situations coaches shared how their team wasn’t as good as they could have been last season.

And this is regardless of how many games they won or even of they went to the state or NCAA tournament.

And most coaches’ biggest issue has something to do with the team’s culture and leadership.

“My team didn’t have any leaders.”

“Our leaders didn’t work hard.”

“The leaders on our team are content with being average.”

“Our leaders lacked mental toughness.”

The problem with our approach is we continually treat the symptoms instead of the disease. The disease is a selfish culture. The selfish culture stems from a lack of leadership.

Yet we focus on the symptoms by investing the majority of our time and money into new gear, strategy, film study, skill workouts, conditioning, recruiting, etc..

I know everyone on a team wants to be a part of a special culture more than anything else. Research shows player satisfaction is not based on fame, winning, or scholarships. People yearn to be a part of an organization or team that is committed to serving each other and a mission greater than themselves.

A culture of success.

A culture of excellence.

A culture of selflessness.

A few years ago I made up my mind to start working to build as I defined it at the time, “a culture of selflessness”.

I wanted a team who loved and cared for each other more than anything else.

Transformation Issues

As coaches we talk a lot about the selfless culture.

We come up with great metaphors and cliches to stress this and feel our job is done by slapping them on the back of a t-shirt with our program’s name on it.

We > ME

No “I” in Team

Play hard. Play Smart. Play Together.

A few years ago I used the acronym F.A.M.I.L.Y. (Forget About Me I Love You). We put it on our t-shirt. We broke from every huddle shouting it out. We yelled it from the sidelines and in the locker room. Still, players continued to put themselves before the team. Little in our culture changed.

I wanted to be able to transform the culture of our program more than anything else. The problem was I just did not know how. I was trying to “transform” the culture in all the wrong ways.

“All human motivation arises from a longing for transformation, there are three different types of transformation. When a thirsty man drinks, he transforms his condition. When a poor man hits the lottery, he transforms his circumstance. And when Mr. Scrooge wakes up on Christmas morning an utterly new man, he has experienced a transformation of being.” -Business Secrets of the Trappist Monks by August Turak

Turak goes on to explain none of those transformations are bad in themselves, but they become harmful when we substitute one form of transformation for another. Whether we realize it or not we all want a transformation of being, from “selfishness to selflessness”.

Nearly every attempt I made to transform our culture failed. It failed for a lot of reasons that other coaches experience as well.

We think landing a big recruit or a talented player will put our program on the right track.

We think getting our first head coaching job will gain us respect.

We think a player earning a college scholarship will “fix his situation.”

We think if we win the Championship we will have finally built that culture of excellence.

The problem is we will still feel empty, because none of those are transformations of being for ourselves or our players.

“If we only had some leaders on our team…”

So I tried to develop leadership on the team, but for years I was fairly unsuccessful.

The trick is that the solution lies within ourselves not within our players.

I focused on trying to change others, but I didn’t look at what needed changing in myself.

I wanted to develop leaders without developing leadership within myself.

I wanted to develop character without developing my own character.

When your players start seeing you work to grow and transform yourself and your leadership style they will only gain respect for you and be motivated to follow.

When coaches come to me asking for advice on building leaders and improving the culture of their team I ask two really hard questions:

Are you open to changing your leadership style?

Are you willing to engage in the process of personal transformation that you want for your players?

The Bottom Line

I do not pretend to be an expert on matters involving building team culture and leadership, but I have been in the dark just like so many other coaches throwing new ideas out every season. For me it took mentorship from a really incredible person named Jamie Gilbert to guide me on those first few steps.

I know this for sure. People are not born any different then when you or I were born.

People are not born selfless and appreciative.

People are not born with a strong work ethic.

People are not born leaders.

It is the parents, teachers, and coaches that are of the greatest impact in their lives. We are responsible to our newest generation.

We have a responsibility to get this right and getting it right starts by looking within.

And then we can start focusing on ways to build character, leadership, and culture.

-J.P. Nerbun