“Are you a coach of success or a coach of significance?”

This week, we reach into the Peak Performance Vault for a episode featuring leadership & culture guru Jeff Janssen from 2007!

On this episode, you’ll learn:

How to KNOW you are making a difference in the lives of your athletes
The training needed to develop true leadership
The importance of keeping the main thing the main thing
How to build confidence in your players
and much more…

The Janssen Sports Leadership Center develops college and high school student-athletes and coaches into world-class leaders who are committed to a lifetime of service, success, and significance.

Top Coach Network_150_dec2014

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

Cain: This is Brian Cain live with Jeff Janssen of Janssen Peak Performance out of Cary, North Carolina. I’m sure a lot of listeners to this interview have already been to his fantastic website: it’s www.JeffJanssen.com.

Jeff, thanks for sitting down and taking the time to chat with us today. I really appreciate it. For the Inner Circle members most of them are (I’m sure) familiar with your stuff already but for those who aren’t Jeff is one of the world’s leading authorities on leadership development and Peak Performance. It’s an absolute honor to be able to sit down with him today.

Jeff, could you give us your background in the Peak Performance industry and how you got to be where you are today as one of the top authorities in the world.

Janssen: I’d be happy to. I was real privileged to start out at the University of Arizona. I got my Master’s degree there and while we were there the stuff we were learning and the experiences that we were having it just seemed like it really needed to be shared with the coaches and student athletes there.

Mike Candrea, who is their softball coach and a big baseball kind of guy at heart who has applied a lot of baseball stuff to the softball world very successfully, gave me an opportunity to work with his program. Fortunately for me and unfortunately for Coach Olsen and his program that was kind of the early 90s where Arizona men’s basketball would end up a pretty good seed going into the tournament and would end up losing in the first round to some teams that they shouldn’t be losing to.

So both of those guys gave me an opportunity to work with their programs and fortunately things went very well and they decided to go to the athletic director and create a fulltime position for me. I spent eight years with Arizona’s athletic department working with all of their different teams and their coaches. As you might imagine you learn a tremendous amount during those eight years with those stellar coaches and you learn a lot from the programs that are struggling too.

So I did that for eight years. During that time there were obviously a lot of schools because not everybody has their own sports psych consultant so a lot of other schools said “can you come out and do some workshops for us.” That eventually got to the point of being a self sustaining business. I was fortunate to then create my own consulting company. We moved to Cary, North Carolina, and just going out to a variety of different schools.

Fortunately then three years ago the University of North Carolina, their athletic director, Dick Baddour, decided to create the comprehensive leadership academy called the Carolina Leadership Academy at Carolina. So I got a chance to work with a variety of student athletes there from all sports. We’ve got a few different levels. We’ve got a program for freshmen called the Creed Program. We’ve got a rising stars program which targets sophomore and junior student athlete emerging leaders. We spent a year with them trying to teach them what it takes to be a leader and how to gain everyone’s respect and step up to be a vocal leader. Then we’ve got a third program for the veteran leaders because they are the ones who are in the fire and having to deal with all this stuff.

Part of the leadership academy too is we meet regularly with the coaches and do a lot of professional development with them. Also their administrators are involved. That has gone so well that now there are schools like Stanford and Pitt and Yale and Illinois and some others now who are getting on board with the leadership academy concept and finding out that all this training – you can’t just do a onetime thing but it’s really an ongoing, systematic, comprehensive kind of program. So there is the somewhat brief version of my background.

Cain: You’ve talked about the Carolina Leadership Academy. I’ve heard a lot of great stuff about it. Is that academy something that you just do with the Carolina athletes, coaches, and administrators who are a part of the UNC athletic department? Or is it something where they have a leadership camp in the summer where someone who is a high school athlete or another college athlete or one of the coaches listening to this that they can send their kids there to get the same kind of experience through you?

Janssen: Right now we don’t really have that camp available. Obviously with the high schools and colleges you’ve got kids working and then you’ve got the whole how do we send these kids there financially and give them some time. So most of my stuff is me going to a particular school and doing what I call a leadership summit where I will spend time with the coaching staff and talk about how best to develop and groom and partner with the leaders then usually meeting with a group of 50-60 student athlete leaders from each school from a variety of sports and taking them through a two hour workshop on what it means to be a leader and how they can step up and be effective. So that’s a lot of what I do.

But as I mentioned there are some schools now who are taking a more comprehensive approach where I’ll be visiting 4-10 times throughout the year and kind of staying in touch that way.

Cain: Some of the things you mentioned about going in and doing a leadership summit – and I know that some of the Division 1 coaches and higher level university coaches have the opportunity to maybe have the budget to bring you or some of the high school coaches that would have that booster club or in their budget to be able to bring in a guy like yourself. What are some of the benefits of the leadership academy?

I know that as captains a lot of times kids are elected captains but we don’t necessarily give them the skills to lead. I know that your programs are designed to give the kids the skills to lead. What are some of the other benefits that your programs offer?

Janssen: I think the huge benefits are just raising the standards of play. I think coaches are frustrated because it seems like we’re the only ones who are trying to drive this whole machine with the attitudes and the chemistry and the commitment and it seems like how do we get kids to want it half as badly as we do. I think when you can get the leaders within the teams and now they’re leading peers you can just get so much more accomplished.

When you have kids taking co-ownership of the program and they take pride in what is going on then they’re the ones who are going to be setting and establishing the standards. They’re the ones who are going to echo the things that the coaches say out in practice. They are going to echo those in the locker room. They are going to echo those in the weight room. They are going to echo those on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights when somebody is about to screw up with something. I think you’ve got now somebody embracing your standards.

I think when you’ve got great leaders you are going to help build a sense of chemistry. They are going to help welcome those younger kids under their wings. You are going to have better – during adversity you are going to have a leader step up and understand the gravity of the situation and keep the main thing. The main thing, as we just talked about with the Vermont leaders here.

I just think there are so many benefits. I think there are obviously the competitive benefits when you’ve got somebody stepping up and leading but there is also just the things that give coaches and programs black eyes are a lot of the times the off the field shenanigans that hap...

BC108: Jeff Janssen | Developing Leadership & Culture #Pillar2