SPEAKER_00 0:04

You're listening to the Hanging with the AD podcast, where we break down hot topics in athletic administration and lessons learned through leadership. Now, here are your hosts, Josh Matthews and Don Baker.

SPEAKER_02 0:16

Welcome to another edition of the Hang with the AD podcast, where we bring you conversations with leaders who challenge us to think differently, lead intentionally, and ultimately get better at what we do. Today we are taking the podcast international for the very first time as we welcome JP Nurburn joining us all the way from Ireland. JP is an executive coach, author, podcaster, and the founder of TOC Culture Consulting. He spent his career helping coaches, athletic administrators, and organizations build stronger cultures and become more effective leaders. A former basketball coach, JP has authored five books focused on team culture, sports parenting, and transformative leadership. His latest The Culture Captain released in June of 2026 provides athletes with a four-level framework for learning to lead themselves, others, and ultimately their teams. In today's conversation, we dig into a word that gets used a lot in athletics, culture. But what does it really mean to build one? How do you hold people accountable without creating fear? How do athletic directors establish a shared culture across an entire department? And perhaps one of the toughest questions in athletics, what happens when winning and your values collide? We also explore the power of curiosity and leadership, how we can turn sports parents into partners and why changing a culture requires a whole lot more than putting inspirational words on a locker room wall. JP challenges us to look beyond what we say we believe and examine what our everyday actions actually communicate. So let's head across the Atlantic and get into our conversation with JP Nurman right here on the Hangin' with the AD podcast.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

We have a first. You are our first international conversation, uh, and we appreciate you joining us from Ireland today.

SPEAKER_04 2:21

Well, it's good to be here. I'm originally from South Carolina, but I in Ireland nearly 12 years. So yeah, it's glad to be the first, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 2:30

Yeah, yeah. South Carolina is much closer to where we are than Ireland, but we're glad to have you joining us, uh, taking time today to be with us. So for our listeners, JP Nurban is an executive coach, author, founder, podcaster, and uh several other things in the culture and leadership space. You can find him in a lot of different places. JP's written five books on team culture, parenting in sports, and transformative leadership. Uh his latest book came out in June of 2026, it's titled The Culture Champion: a four-level framework for athletes. Know yourself, lead yourself, lead others, and lead the team. So uh great, great read there. He is the founder of TOC Culture Consulting. He is a co-host on Coaching Culture Podcast with one of our former guests, Betsy Butterick, and Nate Sanderson also. And uh you can you you basically could call JP a culture champion. Uh we'll stop right there and let JP tell us a little bit more about his journey through athletics and leadership. Uh JP, we like to call it the back of the baseball card bio. So take a minute, tell us what the back of JP Nurban's baseball card might look like.

SPEAKER_04 3:37

Well, I I appreciate that introduction. Uh, never been called a culture champion before, but I love it. The book was that the most recent book is actually called The Culture Captain.

SPEAKER_01 3:45

Um, I'm sorry. Sorry about that.

SPEAKER_04 3:48

It's all good. It's all good. Um, you know, my background is is as a coach basketball uh for my first 10 years in coaching, and I coached professionally internationally. I coached high school uh in Tennessee, high school basketball, I was a teacher. So I've had that experience of being at some high levels and then being kind of more on that you know youth level, academy level camps, and and high school. And um that journey for me was very profound because um, you know, I just look back at 2016 and you know, I really like every coach out there want to make a difference and impact my athletes' lives. I want to help them grow as people. Uh, I don't know of a coach out there that that's in it for any other reason than that. But uh, you know, I tried all the leadership curriculums and all these little classes and things like that and uh to try to have a better impact. But it was a mentor that a mentor coach that worked with me that helped me to realize um that I had some gaps in my own leadership and my own coaching and how showing up for my athletes and and how I was holding them accountable in ways that were working against my example and my coaching methods were working against the impact that I wanted to have. So that mentor uh coach, you know, helped me grow my awareness. And then I started to make some changes. And, you know, funny enough, that the I just loved the journey that I was on and I just started writing about it. I just started sharing what I was learning and as I was reading, and then I started a podcast. I started interviewing all these people and culture and leadership, not just in the sports world. I wanted to learn from people in other fields that that had a good idea around um so many different aspects from behavior change to psychology to um just overall well-being that is so important for us and our athletes. So that journey led to me to having more conversations with coaches that wanted to um connect with me. And uh, and then I went and got my executive coaching certification through Georgetown University because I learned about this whole profession, the corporate space uh of coaching leaders and how it was the most impactful thing in the corporate space they believed out there for leaders. And so uh I went and got that certification. And I still primarily coach coaches or coach uh administrators or people in sports, um, mostly like you know, front office uh of some teams and things like that. I do a bit of corporate coaching as well. But you know, that's that is initially, it was my own personal journey journey has kind of set me on this path to kind of maybe walk the journey with other coaches.

SPEAKER_02 6:16

Now, JP, before we dive into culture and leadership, I want to lean into something you just said there. Take us back a little bit. You spent more than a decade coaching basketball, eventually moved into, like you said, leadership coaching and consulting with adults. What happened along that journey? Was it that conversation with that mentor that made you realize that your calling might be less about coaching a team and more about coaching people who lead teams?

SPEAKER_04 6:41

Ooh, that's a great question. I mean, if I had to be honest, there were a few factors that just kind of helped present that opportunity. And one is that my time in Tennessee came to an end because my wife took a job in Pennsylvania. So we moved to Pennsylvania for three years. And, you know, it was being on the journey and and uh of my own leadership. And I kind of thought about this question. This is probably a question I've asked for the last 10 years, which is what do coaches really need? You know, what do leaders really need?

SPEAKER_02 7:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 7:11

And initially I tried to answer that through like, hey, I could go give workshops and teach and like kind of teach them all the things, but or maybe teach their athletes. And it was like what coaches really need, they're really, really crying out for is someone to hold space for them, to listen, to ask good questions, to share when appropriate, maybe some ideas that might help them, but really more so um, you know, in executive coaching, you believe that the person that you're working with, um, that they have the solutions inside them so often, right? It's helping them to figure out what's getting in the way and help them to find the solutions and partner. And it's more of a partnership rather than a mentorship, right? So that's the approach that I've learned leaning on taking, but it just comes back to what do coaches need. And too many coaches are walking the journey um and kind of it's a solo journey, right? And they're it's very isolating and they can't talk to their assistant coaches and they don't necessarily always feel like they can maybe talk to their bosses and things like that. So uh I just try to fill a need.

SPEAKER_02 8:11

Let me lean in something that you said there, because there's a lot of different ways you can do that. Do you find that it is just getting around a table and sitting down with them that that is more effective than any other format? I mean, I know that's a little bit more of a grind, right? It's a it's a little bit more of a slow burn when you're talking about in mass, but do you find that that's the best way to do that?

SPEAKER_04 8:35

Well, I mean, when you look at, I mean, there's so many articles I could cite from the Harvard Business Review and research journals out there that when it comes to leadership development, um what is most necessary is you need experience. So you need to be in it, right? You need to have that actual experience that you can learn from. But then it's not necessarily coming in just like telling people what to do. It's about having someone that helps you to process those things and take those lessons from it. So yeah, I mean, I think I think it's fairly consistent. So I do most of my coaching virtually because my coaches are all over the world that I work with or leaders I work with all over the world. But that one of the other cool things too, Don, and and your questions are really great, by the way, but like is you know, I did a uh a workshop for an athletic department, a college athletic department there last Friday. And um, what I find most beneficial, even when I do workshops and even sometimes keynotes, is to get people in the room to start to coach each other. And so I teach them some of the tools around powerful listening, levels of listening, asking good questions, mirroring or sharing reflecting. I teach those three tools and then we do work on the things that are pressing for them. So the cool thing in that setting is people get more connected, they understand each other better, they understand themselves better because when you're coaching asking good questions, people have this growing awareness, and then they also build up these skills around how to have better conversations that they then take back to their athletes.

SPEAKER_01 9:59

Gotcha. Yeah, that's good. That's good. All right, JP, I want to jump to culture, and I do want to go back and uh reiterate your book is the culture captain. Uh I think I probably stated, I don't really know what I said, but I think I might have stated another book. So I didn't mean to promote someone else, but it's right there behind you, the yellow copy, I believe, right?

SPEAKER_04 10:17

Um, that's it.

SPEAKER_01 10:19

Yeah, the culture captain there. But let's let's talk about the the word culture, it gets thrown around everywhere in athletics, right? Every coach says they want a great culture, and almost every program has core values printed on the wall or t-shirt somewhere, you know, put up somewhere prominent. But having words on a wall and actually having a culture are two different things. How do you define culture and how can a leader tell the difference between the culture they say they have and the culture they actually have?

SPEAKER_04 10:47

Well, one of my favorite books is the culture code, and I think Daniel Coyle defines culture in there as culture is what you do. And I would say, yes, culture is made up of the standards and it's made up of the connections, the relationships within that. But I would say what really drives what you do is mindsets, it's it's thinking. And so when I really want to understand uh a culture, um, I don't want to just see, are we working hard or are we treating people well? But what is the motivation behind that? And what are the beliefs behind that? So this is why we team, you know, coaches and teams and leaders, when things are going well at the beginning of the season, you know, the culture is strong because it hasn't been faced adversity. And then adversity happens, and that's where you start to see the you know things, you know, the beliefs, you know, the doubt starts to creep in, and then those behaviors really struggle. So really come culture comes down to you know the beliefs that drive behaviors.

SPEAKER_01 11:40

Oh, that's that's good. I really like that mindset idea because Don and I are around coaches all the time, um, high school athletic coaches, obviously. And it's amazing to see the ones who don't really worry about what they have or don't have, and they have a mindset of success and excellence versus others who have that mindset of, well, I can't do this or I can't, you know, I can only get this far. And and they find excuses, right? And that leads to, if you if you back up and you look at the culture, their overall programs are probably pretty poor most of the time, right? And and not really good sustainable programs. So I love that. I hope people listening will understand the culture. Is it all that other stuff that we mentioned? It is it starts with your mindset. So that's a great word to get us going there.

SPEAKER_02 12:31

That's good stuff. Now, JP, one thing I think athletic administrators wrestle with, we this was just in, I mean, this seems like it's in the news every single day, where you have instances in programs where it's either either kids doing something from a hazing, bullying standpoint, or an abusive coaching practice standpoint. I think that ADs wrestle with that difference between setting high standards and creating a punitive environment. We want accountability, but we also want relationships, trust, and young people who aren't afraid to make mistakes. So, how do great leaders hold people to a really high standard without creating this culture that's built around I gotcha or fear?

SPEAKER_04 13:13

Well, I love that question. And I I love the question because you've already pointed out one of the big mistakes that we're starting to see in athletics today, which is the punitive, fear-based coaching has been called out. And but well, you've gone a bit of a pendulum swing, and now we're in this culture where it's like, well, we just got to give kids self-esteem and it's all about being positive, and we don't really give them hard truths. And if we look at any of us, there's not a coach out or a person out there that says this was one of the best coaches I had was you'll hear two things consistently. They believed in me and they were really demanding, they were tough, and those things are two, it goes, they go hand in hand because I believe in this athlete, I know that they're capable, I know they can work hard, I hold high standards of them. So it those things go hand in hand, and we need to have a new way of approaching accountability. And this is the biggest thing, the two biggest things that changed in my coaching back in 2016 were I've started to focus more on relationships with the person. So I understood them better, understood their goals. And that then the next thing was how I held athletes accountable. So rather than handing them a list of rules, we co-created standards. But that isn't just co-creating standards at the beginning of your season around how you want to approach practice or the weight room or games and all that, you know, playing time and attitude. That is not really setting the standard. The setting the standard comes when you hold the standard and you enforce the standard with accountability. Now, what does that look like? Well, you gotta, you know, there's there's some great coaches in, you know, the John Woodens of the day, all the way to today, and they don't use a punitive approach. What they do is they reinforce that, you know, let's say in practice, for instance, practice is a privilege, being an autist team is is a privilege. And so they we use more logical consequences, which reinforce this as a get-to, not a got to. Uh, but we agree upon those consequences. So I'm not gonna yell at you, I'm not gonna scream at you anymore. Okay. What I'm gonna do is when you're not working hard on that rep, I'm gonna say, do it again. And if I ask you again, you know, to go at the rep at the work rate that we expect, all right. Now I'm gonna ask you to step off. And as soon as you're ready to come back in and start working at our standard, you let me know. And that's simple process. Once I started doing that, maybe once or twice a year, I was asking a player to step off for the day of practice. But we had to set the standard, they knew the standard, we agreed upon the standard, and then from there, I offered support. I offer a reminder, we get them to do it again, but then we start asking players to step off. The big thing in there is I'm not yelling, I'm not screaming, it's my tone of voice is about belief. Hey, I know you're capable of more. Let's see it. And if they choose to not work hard, then they're choosing that consequence. So that was one of the biggest shifts I ever made in my coaching.

SPEAKER_02 15:56

Yeah, I think too, that like first of all, what you're saying there, it's an us thing, right? Like we, these are things we agree that we want to do. Uh, and so I think student voice is more important now than it ever has been. At the same time, I do feel like you can still coach kids hard. They just have to know where it's coming from, right? And like when when when I was young, I just got talked at a lot. I didn't get talked to, right? And it was just just whatever they say, do it. Uh kids are today are not built like that. You know, they have there that relationship piece matters to them. And if they don't know where it's coming from, that's a problem. But it doesn't mean you can't coach kids hard. So I think that's that's what I that's what I hear you saying. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 16:35

Well, yeah, I mean, that's what I said. I back in 2016, it was relationship, and then with the high standards. And then when you have that relationship, you understand what's important to them. Sometimes it's just curiosity. It's just like, hey, you know, you seem off today in practice or, you know, like what's going on? And you have that relationship that they're willing to say, share, and open up. That doesn't mean we say, okay, well, you've had a bad day and you got a bad grade on the test there. No, no problem. You can you don't have to work hard. But then you go, okay, well, what can we do? What can you do to get raise your standard today? Because we need you, you know, here. You know, we at least need you here. You don't need to be exceptional every day, but we have our baseline buy-in, non-negotiable standards, and we need you there.

SPEAKER_02 17:14

Yeah, Josh was just talking about this yesterday. We're talking about that idea that your 100% today may be 70%, right? B based on the circumstances that have happened in that 24-hour period. And I I think everything we're talking about can be transferred to the adult world as well, right? Knowing your people and and who how you drive them and all of the things that happen in an adult's life as well. So I think that I think it's universal.

SPEAKER_01 17:42

I tell you what I love out of that. I mean, uh it's all gold. I love that little phrase, logical consequences. I think we're in a world today where the best coaches, as you mentioned, they are giving consequences at a different level, and that's what's winning for them over the people who are still doing the same old, you know, offensive linemen run 500 yards or full pads because they missed one assignment, right? It's just illogical. We've actually got some direction and some um advice from national associations to say coaches, advise your coaches to think logically about consequences. I love that quote, I love that phrase. That's good.

SPEAKER_04 18:22

Yeah, let me just add to that. I mean, I was just on a coaching call earlier with a you know, a college, you know, coach and uh, you know, high-level program, ACC division one, you know, division one program. And this coach was struggling with you know a player that missed two practices and a workout. And the reason was, you know, they were having stress and anxiety around this really, really difficult workout that was coming in. Now that's a really sensitive, very difficult subject to engage. And yet the reality is empathy without accountability is a short-sighted attempt to relieve human suffering. Anna Lemke said that in her book, Dopening Nation, and she's a psychiatrist, and she says this is one of the biggest issues around psychology and my mental health lately. And so it'd be very easy to say, okay, that's okay, you know, you got these issues. But instead, it wasn't a punitive consequence, right? And if that coach had done a punitive consequence, I mean, they could probably be out of a job potentially, right? But it was a restorative consequence, which is hey, what are the natural consequences of you missing this? Okay, you missed a workout, so you didn't get in shape. You let your team down. They are frustrated because you didn't show up and you didn't communicate that, okay, to all of us, what was going on. And then also you are dealing with stress and anxiety. So you have to opt into certain things. So the restorative consequence is meeting with the psychologist once a week. It is sitting down with your teammates and having a conversation to have better awareness of the effect of them missing on that. Not to make them feel bad, but just to understand how that is important to that. And from there, there's a you know a follow-up meeting with the coaches, and they had to do the conditioning, still make up the conditioning because they had to address the natural consequences. Uh, they had to make the situation right. And this is about making a situation right, is making that person right, right? That athlete that's struggling, but also recognizing that they're part of a team and a team's counting on them. And there's certain things that they can do to make that right as well.

SPEAKER_01 20:16

So good, really good. I'm glad we chased that rabbit because that's that's I think that's a hot button, new new age way of thinking that we have to get our coaches to get out of this old school uh punitive consequence, which all it does is create issues from an athletic administrative uh standpoint as well.

SPEAKER_04 20:37

So just one thing on that, Betsy Butterick, she says this all the time. If you want to opt out, you gotta opt into something, right? You know, you want to take you want to take time off. Like we have this a lot in athletics, which is hey, I'm really, really struggling, you know, uh like X, Y, and Z, whether it's school, pressure, life, that's great. But what are you gonna do other than just sit at home and watch Netflix all day or scroll your phone? It's like like we're not doing anything to to to opt into better mental health so often, right? It's just we got to take time off. That's not that's not there's there's no research to show that's just that's the way to go about it, right? There's better things that we can do than uh so it's about helping athletes to make those right choices to to get themselves right. And I would say the same thing for for for coaches. Like I know Don talked about this. All these things can be applied applied to coaches too um when when coaches mess up, when coaches make mistakes.

SPEAKER_01 21:25

Yeah, it's good. Speaking of coaches, speaking of athletic directors who lead staffs of coaches for uh local school that may be 15, 20, 25 head coaches. Don has a group of 16 athletic directors, but uh, you know, let's say we have a group of head coaches, and every one of them has a different personality, a different leadership style, different level of experience, and a different definition of culture. How does an athletic director work to create an overarching culture for the athletic department while still allowing individual individual Individual coaches, their freedom to lead authentically?

SPEAKER_04 22:03

That's a really good question. And I would have answered that question differently two, three years ago. But due to my work a lot with athletic departments, what I've found is that if I take a job as an AD, a lot of times we want to, okay, let's sit down, let's set our mission, vision, values, right? Let's set our standards. But we're coming at that with so far apart. We are so far apart from what that could be shared oftentimes, what those standards look like, what best practices look like. So I actually really try to create a culture, a coaching culture within an athletic department. And that could simply be the simplest action item there is to just have a monthly meeting where we listen to a podcast and get together and talk about something around culture related. It could be, you know, more than that, right? But the idea is that we're starting to educate and also start to have conversations around what's most important to us here and what are the best ways for us to go and achieve those types of things and to live out those values, to operationalize values. And then from there, you know, after about a year, I think it's now it's time. If we've created a culture, we've had conversations. Now we could sit down and really and really try to identify what's most important to us as an athletic department and have some sort of overarching, you know, a value or two that we want to have drive some standards for our coaches, standards for our athletes, standards for our parents. Um, but within that, every coach, if they're in the right place, they can be themselves. They can, they can operate in the way that they see true to them and be authentic to their values if they're in the right place, right? There, they're like that there's there shouldn't be a misalignment, but you might get to a point and say, whoa, you know, like this is what we're about. This is the sandbox. You could play anywhere in that sandbox, but you start to step out of that with some of the behaviors that you might be demonstrating as a coach, down to, you know, an overemphasis on, you know, winning at all costs and you know, and not and not and supporting the multi-sport athlete, right? These become values of a school. And they say, well, we need multi-sport athletes here. Or, you know, some schools may say we don't need that. We want that, we want to be elite in all of our sports. And we want, you know, so those are different, but it's get having those conversations um that are really, really important early on to set up that big kind of conversation where you bring your head coaches in and say, let's who do we want to be? Who do we not want to be? And that's probably the most important question you can answer. It's really easy to answer the question, who do we want to be here? Right. And it, but it is much harder to say, who do we not want to be? Because you can't be all things to all people. So really defining your identity is oftentimes saying, Who do we not want to be?

SPEAKER_02 24:37

That is good. You dropped another thing in there. I don't even know if you meant to do it, but not because you're an author, but you're also a podcaster. So I guess you get a bonus. This is a one for one. But I know a lot of a lot of ADs may try to do book studies with their uh with their staffs, but you may have a staff that doesn't have a ton of readers on it. Well, okay, fine. Do a podcast study. Like ever I mean, listen, you can listen to that in the car. You can listen to that like that that is an idea I think that more people probably need to lean into because that's a different avenue that people digest information that may be able to, you know, you can in real time pull that podcast up and listen to it, you know, and all that kind of stuff. So I think that's that's its own little nugget, uh, first of all. But and I promise we did not give JP the questions before we did this, but he just teed up the next question because you mentioned that idea about winning at all cost. This is a tough one for A. D. So what do you do when you've got a coach that is successful? They win a lot, but the way that they lead people doesn't align with the values of the overarching athletic department. At what point does protecting the culture become more important than protecting the results? Because the community, you know, they they see that he's winning, right? Or they see that she's successful, but probably not doing it in the way that you want it done. And you you have to have those difficult conversations. Maybe walk us through that.

SPEAKER_04 26:05

Yeah, I mean, that's a really common challenge, like you said. And I think it comes back to first off right a bit of curiosity that you might have with those coaches, because I still don't believe that those coaches, and I know those coaches, I've seen those coaches, and I was one of those coaches at times that people said, Well, geez, this guy all he cares about is winning. That wasn't the case, right? But I kind of you kind of lose your way. And so here's an activity you could do with all your coaches, right? It would be a simple activity, but you'd pair up everybody and your let's get all your coaches together, pair them all up, and say, uh, you're gonna peer coach each other and you're gonna ask each other this question what's most important to you as a coach? What's most important to you as a coach? Now, let's just say the most winningness coach, still, you know, like that guy you're talking about or that girl you're talking about, they say winning. Now, I don't know a lot that will say winning, but let's just say they say winning because I've had athletes say that. And then then you do this thing, we call it peel the onion. You go, what's most important about that? And then they let all of them respond. And then you go, what's most important about that? So you ask it at least three times. What's most important to you as a coach? What's most important about that? What's most important about that? What that does is starts to peel back the onion. Now, if it's winning, succeeding, you know, being the best, then you start to pull it back. It's like, then now you start to find the meaning, you start to find the values. Well, you know, winning or being the best is like, you know, knowing that you gave everything to the sport and you you're trying and effort and you're working hard, you know, towards a common goal. Okay, now we're starting to hear about work ethic and teamwork. Okay, what's important about that? So you start to pull back the layers. So you could do that in a coaching staff meeting, or you could do it just in a one-to-one. Just sit down and say, hey, coach, what's most important to you? What's most important to you as a coach? And then whatever the okay, tell me a little bit more about that. What's most important about that? And get them and say, you know, coach, what I'm hearing is like you really value these things. You really value these things. It's not all about winning. You're a really winning coach, you're really being successful. Let's talk about how you feel like you're doing in those other areas. You know, how how are those things going for you? And how are those things going for your players?

SPEAKER_02 28:10

I tell you what, uh, you've I've heard uh Vanessa Venn Edwards talk about the idea of being curious, right? And and driving conversation. You may have we we have for years on this this podcast tried to crack the mystery of the interview. Because when people come and interview, you're gonna get their best. You're gonna get their very best. You should. And when you ask them a question like what is what's more important to you as a coach, they're not to your point. Very few people are gonna say winning, right? Especially in an interview where they know they don't want me to just just say winning. They want me to talk about the overall kid and you know all this kind of stuff. But it is the peeling of that onion. It is that what's important about that? And then what's important about like stay curious, like through that question, stay curious to get to what is real because what's real is in there. And I think if you continue to keep digging, like you're talking about, you'll get to it much more authentic answer than you would otherwise. I think that's really good.

SPEAKER_04 29:10

Yeah, let me add to that. Like you're running the money. You you really can't fake it.

SPEAKER_02 29:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 29:15

You really can't fake that, right? What will either happen is like, I don't know, like like, and they'll go to that place. And then that will share something about, you know, that they don't want to do the work, they don't want to think, they don't want to reflect. But you will, when you ask the second third time, you're actually getting them now to think. The first time they're not thinking, they're just giving you that first thing that comes to their mind. You ask it a second, third time. I actually tell coaches, college coaches do this all the time in recruiting, you know, because you say, you know, like especially the transfer portal. I got a coach there and they was talking the other day, and they're like, well, they always say, you know, they they're about here because they want to come to win and they want this and that. And it's like, yeah, but then you keep peeling that onion, and eventually they'll start to show you what is what they really value, what what stands out, and they'll also start to reconnect to it potentially themselves.

SPEAKER_01 30:00

Good. Speaking of curious, you set up the next question. I was gonna ask a another question about curiosity. Um, athletic directors, we are really, really good at solving problems, and we want to get things off our desk, we want to get to the next fire, put it out, solve it, right? Our natural instinct is really not to be curious when a problem or a challenge comes to us. So, how can we be better at coaching people through their problems, our challenges, whatever word we want to use, instead of solving the problem for them?

SPEAKER_04 30:38

This is so hard. It's so hard. It is a really difficult thing. I just gonna say that right now. Like, I like I we had a leadership retreat that we ran in June, and we had four or five athletic directors out of 12 people that were at their leadership retreat. And we really just practice coaching for three days. You know, we we have great conversations, we enjoy, we have great food and we chill out by the beach. But like we have we teach them how to coach, how to coach their coaches, how to coach their athletes, how to coach others, and how to really listen. And it curiosity really starts with a mindset. The problem is a lot of people can I interrupt.

SPEAKER_01 31:15

I'm sorry, I something hit me when you said about being so hard in the question. Before you get to answer that question, is it hard because of our personality, or is it hard because the person, the coach who has the challenge wants us to solve it really?

SPEAKER_04 31:30

Well, that's a that's a good good question. And I I I would say sometimes they want some people want us to come in and fix their problems for them. Yeah, okay. I know this in my executive coaching. I've got I you could take all the clients I work with, and there's some that just want me to tell them what to do. And there's some people that are just really they don't they don't want my advice, right? And I'm like, you don't want my advice, like you know, you're coaching at this level there from this sport that I don't really know, right? Um, so it varies, but the person that it does it that is hard for, they oftentimes are the ones that need to do the reflection, they need to do the work. So, but it's hard for us as as ADs because I think so much of our identity and our significance and impact has been built around coming in there and being that person that I'm gonna make this job as easy as possible, right? I want I'm gonna remove all barriers and obstacles for them. And and and that just that's disempowering. The same for a coach to an athlete. We remove all the obstacles, it's disempowering. And so it really comes down to mindset. And I think a lot of times people they get hung up on what are some good questions I can ask, all right. You know, I just gave you a good question. What's most important about that, right? But the thing is, the next question must come from a place of curiosity. And it's not a curiosity for information. It's not, I want to learn more about what happened in that situation, right? Two athletes got into a fight or this and that, or this happened in the bus, right? Like it's not a question about well, what happened? Right now, you may need to know those details, right? You probably do need to know those details. But when you're coaching them, you need to go, what you want to under, you want to understand the person, right? You're asking questions, understand. So it's well, well, how are you feeling about that? What's your perspective on that? You know, you know, what are you noticing is going on in that situation, right? So it's just it, I like I don't even want to give question example questions because it really just has to come from a place of curiosity that leads to that to understand the person. If I'm talking to Josh here, it's like, well, what is Josh experiencing? And what's really difficult about this for Josh? And what, you know, you know, like what is he thinking might be a good solution? And and and at certain times, then you can come along and you do mentor and you do say, Hey, well, here's an idea. Here you can try, or sometimes you got to be a leader and say, All right, I get that, but this is what you need to do here, because this is you know school policy or something like that. But more often than not, we need to just listen. And I'll share this one last thing here. We had a coach at our retreat uh and the the this June. And I remember on the last day, he actually the experience was so powerful for him to have people just sit and listen and ask questions and really be curious that he was in tears, bawling his eyes out about how much that meant to him. And I think this is what our athletes, this or our coaches, this is what people crave, is to have someone just really hold space, be curious, and show up, not try to fix them.

SPEAKER_02 34:23

Wow, powerful. Now, let's kind of shift gears just a little bit. We have some friends in the Atlanta area that have a platform called Pure Athlete, and they are helping with that narrative of what parenting through youth sports uh should look like. You've also done some significant work around sports parents. Today's parents aren't inherently the enemy. They love their kids, they want them to succeed. That is their most primary dispossession, and I tell people all the time I really don't care how society views it how important you are or how not important you are. People lose their mind when it comes to their kids, right? But coaches and athletic administrators know how quickly that relationship can become difficult. Uh what are coaches doing that unintentionally turn parents into adversaries? And what could we do differently to make parents partner with that student athlete experience?

SPEAKER_04 35:15

Yeah, I talk a lot about these ideas in my book, The Coach's Guide to Sports Parents. And um, I've had some really tough, uh, tough situations myself with parents over the years and things where I didn't handle them well. The the the biggest thing that we do is right in the mindset, is that we see the parents as the problem. And absolutely they cause cultural problems for us, no doubt about it. I'm not gonna deny that at all. Okay. But what I know is that when we get, we are we are too reactive, we try to build up the our walls, our defenses, build up, hey, this is this is your job, this is my job, and you stay in there and I'm gonna stay over here and stay in your lane. Instead of reaching out and building a relationship and being proactive in that, so that they first off feel that you are uh supportive of their kids' goals, right? So you want you want their child to succeed, not just the team to succeed. Now, some coaches might struggle with that, but my friend Dusty May, who just won a national championship in Michigan, he will tell you he is one of the biggest things that he does is he wants athletes to feel like he is invested in their individual success, not just a team success. So that's the first thing. The second thing is you got to get them then to build a connection to the team. There is no way for them to care about the team if they don't know the team, which is why we do things like we encourage you know parent practices where they come in or you know, little events that are building relationships from parent to parent, parents to the other kids, right? Building those that sense of community. So we're all cheering together. The other big thing that coaches do is they're very slow to take initiative to reach out to parents. Now, a good teacher, if they have an issue with a with a student in the classroom, they're gonna reach out and say, hey, you know, Don's really struggling lately, or he's not getting his homework done. He's been, you know, like let's let's meet. You know, we tend to like just bench the kid, and then we've benched him, or there's discipline issues, and it's only bad. So we as coaches can be proactive and sharing. I think just, hey, thanks for allowing me to coach your son or your daughter. And this is what I love about them. So more proactive deposits every time you see them. Hey, you know, Don's just gotten so much better lately, and or he's doing this really well. Like the more we can do that, the better. And then on the other side of that, the second you start to see challenges and a lack of buy-in to the culture and they're struggling, reach out to the parent and say, Hey, you know, I really struggle with Don right now. He doesn't seem to be really buying into what we're trying to do there. What insights do you have from me about how we might help him? Right? Like little things like that. And it doesn't have to be that, but the idea is the mindset is this parent can actually help me get to that athlete rather than this parent's in that athlete's ear screwing things up, which sometimes they are, but by being on the offensive, we'll be less on the defensive.

SPEAKER_02 38:09

Yeah, I think too, we get caught up a lot of times in the emotion of a parent. And I've told I've told my 80s multiple times, listen for truth. There may be some truth in what they're saying. Just because they're coming at you a certain way, you got to keep in mind. That's their most promised position, they're gonna lose their mind. But listen for truth in what they're saying and see if there is something there. Then on the back end, when you're talking about those kids, find j just a little you you meant you just you hit it right on the head. Just by starting going, I'm excited about blank. That uh that's a positive statement, right? That that's an immediate, that's gonna that's an immediate you know, dopamine hit or whatever for them to go, oh, he's coming at me to talk positively about my kid. Maybe that brings that temperature down a little bit. So yeah, I think it's really good.

SPEAKER_04 39:02

Well one other thing on that is we we take it very personally. And I take it personally. We do so much for these kids as coaches. We sacrifice, we spend more time with uh their kids than our kids. And I get why we take it personally. It's gonna feel personal, but then let's go back to the parent, right? And we're most of us are parents, right, as well. And what's our experience? Well, we don't sit in the classroom with them every day, but we do go to the sidelines. We've been in the back garden or backyard shooting hoops or kicking the ball, whatever it is, right? We've been doing those types of things. We've invested, we've driven them all these places to tournaments and games and all that. So we've made all these deposits in their athletic career. So it's very easy and understandable. Doesn't make it excusable, their behavior parent behavior, but it's very understandable that they become very, very triggered very easily and emotional. And if we could just recognize that, we can probably help to de-personalize and go, oh, the way that they're acting or that parents doing this, that just says more about them and where they're at than it says anything about the job that I'm doing.

SPEAKER_01 40:05

Yeah, I think I've repeated that to a couple of coaches. Yeah, go ahead, keep going.

SPEAKER_04 40:08

Yeah, there's just one story I want to share on this because it was my book, The Culture System, in 2021. I wrote that and I finished it off with, you know, it's all a book about a book about building culture. And as I was writing that, there was a lot that I wrote about that I had in my rough drafts around parents, but I decided to pull that out and remove it and kind of you know hold it to a second book. Well, at the end of the culture system, I write a story about how hard this journey is around building culture. Like I became, you know, I started to make that shift in 2016. I thought, man, everyone's gonna love JP. He cares about the kids and he's a better coach. It's like, oh man, I got heat. In fact, I tell a story at the end of the book about this one parent literally almost tried to drive me off the road with their car, right? After a practice one day and blew up on my face. And I had coached this kid for five years. Parent blows up on me. And just how hard that was. I kid you not, parent didn't read the book, but two weeks after I published that book, I got a text from that parent out of the blue. Hadn't heard from that parent. This is 2021. I hadn't heard from that parent since 2017. They never apologized for that. But the parent said, Hey coach, just want to let you know. I'm all I was just talking to my buddies the other day, and I often, as I often do, and I always tell them that my son's best coach was you. You are hard, you were tough on him, but you loved him, and you you didn't just help him be a better man, you showed me how to be a better parent. I mean, my mind was blown. I was like, it's like I I told my wife I wasn't gonna write the book for on the coach's guide to sports parents until for another couple years. And I was like, I am sorry, I have to start writing it now.

SPEAKER_02 41:36

You're like that, you're like if you know if you would have run me into the ditch, I wouldn't be here today for you to text.

SPEAKER_01 41:41

So yeah, that's funny. Well, you needed it, yeah, got a good basketball coach and needed a good driving coach, right? So yeah, goodness gracious. Wow. All right, JP, a couple um fairly short questions, I think. Just just a couple more, and then we'll do a two-minute drill. But let's say an athletic director or coach is listening right now and thinking, our culture isn't terrible, but it's not really what I want it to be. I want it to be better. They don't need another slogan poster or team building exercise like we've talked about. What's the one most important first, you know, the meaningful thing they could do tomorrow morning to take their culture to a different to it to the next step?

SPEAKER_04 42:21

You need to have a system for really developing your coaches.

SPEAKER_01 42:25

Yep.

SPEAKER_04 42:25

You know, there's a there's a there's a belief Jenny Meyer, the guy that started Shake Shack and has all these great restaurants out there. He wrote it in um his book, uh Setting the Table, but he talks about enlightened hospitality. How do they be you know take restaurants from you know to the best in the world? How do they build these all these great successful restaurants? It was by first focusing on how they treated their their uh employees. And it's about developing them and pouring to them so they knew that. I think the athlete-centered approach, uh, we obviously want to care about athletes, but as an athletic trainer or administrator, your focus should be developing your coaches so they can go and serve your athletes. And so you need to have a clear system, a way of pouring into them, whether it's through, you know, like we said, the monthly get together, but also through consistent one-on-ones that are there more not just there from organizational, logistical, but from holding space, listening, and helping try to develop your coaches. So you got to figure that out. What you can do. I mean, there's ADs that are teaching and coaching and all these things. And we got ADs that are full-time ADs with assistant assistants and full-time staffs, right? Everyone's in a different situation, but you've got to create an environment where where coaching development is valued. Now, this will be my one thing. And I know you want me to have a short answer here. This is my one thing.

SPEAKER_01 43:39

It's all good. No.

SPEAKER_04 43:40

Do not expect 100% buy-in. We every time we want to do a coaching meeting or coach staff meeting or have that you know monthly podcast listen, or like every time we have that conversation with a coach, we want everyone to be bought in. And that's just not realistic. What you can do is actually just hope that 20% are really and Interested and value this. And from that 20%, you can start to build momentum. And then you can start to bring other people in. Um, so you can have your minimum buy-in expectations of a coach. Hey, you're gonna attend these meetings every year, you're gonna complete these courses, you're gonna do XYZ. Know what your minimum buy-in standard is. You want to coach here, you're gonna do this. That helps to raise and then try to raise that a bit because that raises the floor. But then you got to work up here and you got to raise the ceiling. And you're not gonna raise the ceiling on every coach, but you're gonna go pour into the ones that are hungry, that want the support and development.

SPEAKER_01 44:33

That's good. I've never heard it said that way or and really that directly. I think that's great for people to use for their starting point and um you know develop their goals from there. That's I I do agree that developing your coaching staff is primary um responsibility number one. And last question as we close, we're asking each guest this season to kind of respond to this, just fill in the blank. Uh it's just a simple question. Great leaders blank.

SPEAKER_03 45:06

Love. I don't know.

SPEAKER_04 45:10

And how I define love is you know support and accountability.

SPEAKER_01 45:15

Yeah, uh, that's that's a great answer. I think um I think that's uh perfect place for people to start if they were trying to be uh great leaders. So thanks a lot, JP. You kind of blew our mind today. You filled our papers with notes, and uh we look forward to you know kind of hitting rewind on this and listen to it several times. So thanks for being with us. We are going to do a little two-minute drill and get to know you a little bit better. Maybe it's something new for you. Uh, we'll run through this kind of quick and have a little fun with you.

SPEAKER_02 45:40

All right, JP, we're gonna hit you with some rapid fire questions. You just tell us the first thing that comes to your mind. What was the first job that you ever had ever in your life?

SPEAKER_04 45:50

Uh installing heat air conditioning systems.

SPEAKER_02 45:53

Whoa, that's a big time. Okay.

SPEAKER_04 45:55

At the age of 12. In South Carolina. It was not. Yeah, it wasn't.

SPEAKER_01 46:00

You're earning that, yeah. That last word was probably the most uh most uh perfect. It was miserable. So all right. You you defined culture earlier, but let's say culture in one word.

SPEAKER_04 46:16

Beliefs.

SPEAKER_02 46:18

Good. Well, one thing coaches should stop doing immediately.

SPEAKER_04 46:27

Blaming kids these days.

SPEAKER_01 46:30

All right, which is weirder, dogs wearing goggles or people eating ketchup on potato chips.

SPEAKER_04 46:39

Dogs wearing goggles.

SPEAKER_02 46:41

There you go. All right. Which is harder? Establishing a standard or enforcing it?

SPEAKER_04 46:46

Enforcing times 10.

SPEAKER_01 46:50

Oh, okay. If you could experience a favorite memory again for the first time, what would it be?

SPEAKER_04 46:56

Hmm. My wedding day. Love that day.

SPEAKER_03 47:00

Oh.

SPEAKER_02 47:01

Good answer. Uh I have always wanted to be able to play the piano, but I've never put the effort in to learn how to do it. Okay. So, what is something that you would like to be able to do, but you haven't put in the work to be able to learn how to do it?

SPEAKER_04 47:16

Learning a second language.

SPEAKER_01 47:19

Oh, that's good. All right, last one. It's our trademark question today, JP Nurban. You have been hanging with EADs, but let's say you can hang out with anyone. Who would that be and why?

SPEAKER_04 47:32

Um, I mean, what initially popped in was just spending time with my kids because I really value them. Um, but I I geez, I want to pick a coach that I really admire that I haven't gotten to spend time with. Um man, I I think I think handing up Greg Popovich would be a blast. So uh he would serve up some good wine, I'm sure, and we'd have a good time.

SPEAKER_02 47:53

So good deal. JP, before we finish, take a minute. Tell people about uh about your books. Where can they find them? Uh get their hands on them.

SPEAKER_04 48:01

Yeah, I mean, if you go to tocculture.com, you can get all my books listed there. But you know, you search in JP Nurban, N-E-R-B-U-N, and there's not a whole lot of people with the name Nurban in the world. There's really not really any out of it outside of my immediate family. So all my books, the culture system, the culture captain, the coach's guide to sports parents, uh, those books will all come up for you there.

SPEAKER_02 48:20

Good deal. JP, thank you for joining us today for challenging us all to be more intentional uh about cultures that we create, and most importantly, for reminding us that great leadership isn't simply about what we accomplish. It's about the people that we impact along the way. Thanks again.

SPEAKER_04 48:35

Yeah, thanks for the opportunity, guys.

SPEAKER_01 48:38

Well, thank you to JP Nurburn for joining us today. What a great conversation with him and talking about culture, something that he has really honed in on and written about, he speaks about, and really is a culture champion, in my opinion. Thinking about takeaways from this episode, I just want to kind of hone in on one that he kind of hit me between the eyes with very early in the conversation, really before we even ask a real question. Uh, when he was talking about his journey and he talked about a mentor coach of his helping him see the gaps in his own leadership, in his leadership style, where he was falling short. And then he took that conversation and he filled in those gaps to become a better leader, and that led to him being an author because he just wrote about that experience and those experiences, and it just hit me, it made me pause for a second and think about when I have I allowed a mentor of mine or someone else in my life to pick apart and show me the gaps in my own leadership. And I think that was a lesson, real quick. Hopefully, it's a lesson you took away from this is who in your life, who in my life, and when have I allowed them to show me the gaps in my leadership? So a lesson for us to learn today, man, there were so many other nuggets and gold as far as leadership knowledge and expertise in this conversation. I can't wait to uh listen to it multiple times. Hopefully you enjoyed it. Hopefully you wouldn't mind sharing it with a friend. Hit forward, share that with someone who maybe doesn't listen to our podcast. Maybe this episode is uh worth you sharing with someone specifically in your life. Well, if you wouldn't mind doing that, but also while you're there, while you're in your podcast platform, if you would mind sending us a star rating, just press one of those star ratings and help us get to the top of the algorithms, and maybe others can hear this podcast. Thank you for taking your time today and joining us on Hangin' with the ADs.