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904: The Impact of Leadership on College Sports – Jeff Janssen

In both dentistry and sports, leadership is essential for success. In this episode of Better Thinking, Kirk Behrendt brings in Jeff Janssen, founder and president of Janssen Sports Leadership Center, to share his experience working with the top college athletes and coaches and the programs that create better leaders. To learn how to apply his leadership exercises to your dental practice, listen to Episode 904 of The Best Practices Show!

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Episode Resources:

Main Takeaways:

  • All leadership starts with self-leadership.
  • Identify two of your strengths and two areas of improvement.
  • Don't call your team out. Call them “up” to the standards you've set.
  • With leadership alone, you can take your team from a seven to a nine.
  • Balance your ability to relate to people and your ability to require things of them.

Quotes:

“The very first thing that we do is the evaluation. We have to get a lay of the land and an understanding of what leadership is. I think people have a general understanding of what leadership is. But one of the first things we do is talk about there are leaders by example. What does that mean? Leading by example is a lot of, ‘I'm one of the hardest workers on the team. I maintain my poise and composure when stuff is hitting the fan. I have a sense of confidence in myself to step up and lead, and I'm making really good character decisions away from my sport as well.’ That's the first platform that we look at is, are you one of the top three hardest workers on your team, and do you manage all of those things? So, one of the things they do is evaluate themselves as a leader by example.” (7:49—8:37) -Jeff

“All leadership starts with self-leadership. If you can't lead yourself, guess what? You're not going to have the credibility, trust, and respect from your teammates or coaches. So, we've got to start here.” (8:38—8:48) -Jeff

“When we see good commitment, confidence, composure, and character from our teammates, we call that out. That's as simple as, ‘Hey, great workout today,’ or, ‘Way to not lose your composure when you got that bad call from the official. Way to move on to the next play. Great job there.’ So, you're calling people when they do the right thing. But when they do the wrong thing, you're also saying, ‘You know what? We need more from you right now. That kind of effort or that kind of response to that situation is not going to help you, and it's not going to help us.’ So, then we work on holding people accountable to what the standards of the program might be.” (8:55—9:33) -Jeff

“We can measure a heart rate, we can measure somebody's vertical leap, all those different things, the physical aspects. But what this evaluation does is it takes this important intangible of leadership, puts it into some behaviors that we can really monitor and manage and rate, then we can numerically give. And what we do, not only for the kids, but I'm an outside consultant, so I have to come in and prove my ROI for the money that they're investing in what we're doing. I have to show that there's been improvement over time. That's one of the things that we do. We do, certainly, the early-on test. But then, we also do a retrospective pre-post test, and we ask kids, ‘Okay, now that you really understand what it takes to be committed at the highest level, where do you think you were when you started this program? Where are you now?’ So, they're smarter about what it takes to be a leader. As you said, you've got some athletes who think they're God's gift to their sport. When they actually learn, ‘Okay, there is a higher level that Michael Jordan actually brought it at. Oh, okay. Now, I have to raise myself to that higher level too.’” (12:42—13:57) -Jeff

“To me, leadership is one of those plus or minus two factors, is what I usually say. So, let's say that you've got a baseball team on paper. They've got a talent level of about seven. Physically, where they are, they're about a seven. Now, if you've got good leadership for that team, you can probably take that level of seven, making sure that they're working hard in the weight room, staying focused on what they need to do, building their confidence when they're struggling, helping them reframe situations when they're not, that level seven physical talent can probably be bumped to an eight. If you've got great leadership, that can be bumped to a nine. So, now they can start taking on teams that are, on paper, better than them that might have a talent level of nine, but they're now able to compete with them because they're bringing their entire seven and the intangibles and more. Then, conversely, we'll go to that team of nine that might have nine talent on paper, but they don't understand their roles. They're all about themselves. The culture is really poor. They hate their coaches. They're just looking out for themselves. They should be playing at a nine talent level because that's what they have on paper, but they're actually playing at an eight or a seven.” (14:27—15:46) -Jeff

“One of the things that we talk about with our leaders is how important it is to obviously be positive and to understand that if things are going well, we're going to want to keep that rolling. We're going to want to encourage the people who are doing those things. We're going to outwardly show those positive emotions, not in a way that's going to fire up the other team, but we're going to be excited about that . . . The other thing that we talk about too with the leaders is you're going to get frustrated. You're going to get mad. You're going to get down. But you can't show that, not only to your opponents because they know they've gotten into your head, but your own teammates are now starting to worry about you. ‘Oh, she's starting to get really frustrated. She's going internal with what she's doing,’ and all of that. So, that momentum part, I think, is really important.” (16:40—17:29) -Jeff

“The two things that I love when I'm working with leaders, and I try to boil it down to this, is your ability to relate to people and your ability to require things of them. I think what I've learned is that there are certain leaders who are better at the relation stuff. They're really good at checking in with people, connecting with people, making them feel cared for, but they may not hold them accountable to the standard as well. So, that's [one of] their developmental areas. ‘You know what? You’ve got to require some more stuff.’ Then, the exact opposite. ‘We've got to work harder. You’ve got to do this,’ and then people sometimes don't. ‘Well, do you care about me as a person? Do you care about me as an individual?’ That can be a battle with some of the hard-nosed coaches, the old Bob Knight kind of people from years back. That's what we've learned, is that good coaches can do both of those. They know when to relate, when to require, and they understand each person. ‘This person needs a little more requiring. They respond better to that,’ or, ‘This person needs a little more relating. They respond better to that.’ And that's, I think, part of it, is I have to be able to flex my style given what's happening in the season, given who it is that I'm leading at that time.” (27:07—28:20) -Jeff

“We've got a whole manual that basically we show people a stair-step approach of how to hold people accountable. Most people don't like it. I don't like it. Like, I don't like holding people accountable. They think, ‘Well, it's all about coming down and yelling at them,’ or all that. It's like, no — if you put in these other six steps of being crystal clear about what your expectations are, that you're living them yourself, that you've got a good monitoring process . . . You track things and monitor things so that we can see, ‘Yeah, we're hitting the standard,’ or, ‘Oh, no. We're below the standard,’ or, ‘We're above it.’ You praise the people who are at or above the standard. Then, it's a matter of reminding people, ‘Hey, this is our standard. You're here. We need you here. We know you can do that.’ We're going to call you up versus call you out. That's probably one of the best phrases that we really work with our athletes on. A lot of them don't want to call out their roommate, their teammate, or whatever. We're not calling them out. We're calling them up to the standard that everybody collectively set and embraced at the beginning of the year. So, you're reminding them of what it's going to take to be successful.” (28:52—30:03) -Jeff

Snippets:

0:00 Introduction.

0:46 Jeff’s background.

4:55 Why leadership is important in sports.

7:36 Do a self-evaluation on your leadership.

14:02 The impact of leadership on winning, creating a brand, and culture.

16:06 The importance of momentum when it comes to leadership.

18:14 The 360, explained.

23:37 Jeff’s favorite transformation story.

26:48 What most leaders get wrong about leadership.

28:20 How to hold people accountable.

30:12 Is Jeff part of the football program at North Carolina?

31:39 The wild west of sports.

33:49 Final thoughts.

35:09 More about the Janssen Sports Leadership Center.

Jeff Janssen Bio:

Widely considered the world's top expert on sports leadership, Jeff Janssen is the founder and president of the Janssen Sports Leadership Center. His pioneering work in launching and conducting college athletics' first Leadership Academies with student-athletes and coaches began over a decade ago. His groundbreaking work is what originally started the whole field of sports leadership development and continues to be the gold standard today.

As a prolific author, Jeff has authored numerous books, including The Team Captain's Leadership Manual, The Team Captain's Culture Manual, Championship Team Building, Jeff Janssen's Peak Performance Playbook, and How to Develop Relentless Competitors.

Jeff is passionate about his purpose of helping coaches and athletic administrators develop the world's next generation of leaders on and off the playing fields!
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