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The Basketball Podcast: EP414 with Bret Burchard on Making Culture Your Edge
In this week’s basketball coaching conversation, Bret Burchard shares insights on making culture your edge.
Coach Bret Burchard discussed his work with ChampionShift, a mindset training company that helps coaches and athletes compete and lead with confidence, resilience, and humility. Bret shared his experience as a former NBA and college basketball coach, emphasizing the importance of leading for impact rather than validation. He explained how coaches can maintain their passion and effectiveness by reconnecting with the reasons they started coaching, managing their mindset in high-pressure situations, and building a strong team culture.
Bret also highlighted the need for coaches to constantly re-engage their players with the vision and purpose of the team, as engagement is not linear but requires ongoing effort. The episode concluded with Bret offering advice for coaches who didn’t have a great season, encouraging them to face reality, challenge themselves with innovative solutions, and focus on building strong relationships.
Bret Burchard is the co-founder of ChampionShift where he helps elite coaches build high-performing teams fast. With over 15 years of coaching experience at the professional and collegiate levels, Bret understands the pressure to win at the highest levels and the desire to make an impact through coaching. He has co-authored 8 books on leadership and mindset development, including his most recent “Make Culture Your Edge: A Simple Formula for Building Winning Teams.”
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Bret Burchard Quotes:
“I can geek out with the best of them on different strategies of defense and offensive counters and all the X’s and O’s of the game. But I think if we’re honest with ourselves, most of the coaches who I work with got into coaching because they wanted to have an impact on someone’s life.”
“We can lose sight of that original vision, of the original reason why we got into coaching in the first place. And we start drifting towards leading for our own validation rather than what we started about with which is leading for impact. And it happens to all of us.”
“The mission behind my work now is how can we help coaches stay on the path of impact? Because I really believe this: a coach has more of a unique place in a person’s life to have a life-changing impact, than anyone else. More than a teacher, more than a guidance counselor . . I respect all those roles and those positions, but I think there’s no higher calling than to be a coach.”
“A team is going to adopt the mindset of their head coach. A lot of teams I worked with, like 90% of the mistakes a team makes under pressure have originated in the coach’s mindset, whether they realize it or not. And so, the work we can do on ourselves to come in with a clear mind, a fresh perspective, a centered energy to lead the team goes far.”
“If you group it into 3 categories: mindset, skill set, tool set. We can give you all the tools you need to do the job, but if you don’t have the skills to leverage those tools, you’re not going to get the most out of them. And if you don’t have the mindset to show up to lead for impact and not for your own validation, the skills you’ve developed and the tools at your disposal are going to go to waste.”
“We were willing to make all these sacrifices. Over time, we just start drifting from that and we start dreading the sacrifice that’s required. And that’s a first sign of the drift that starts to occur. When we first started, we were willing to tackle the problems in front of us. There were challenges that we had to face and overcome to do it. As we approach those with a clear mind and a calm presence, we’re going to find innovative solutions.”
“We see 3 main tension points show up. Culture is built through the tension points . . a lot of leaders and coaches will experience these tension points and feel like I’m doing something wrong. Or, man, I messed up, or the culture is broken and they get angry about it. And it’s really the opposite. Here is the moment where we can build our culture. Here’s the moment where we get stronger. Here’s the moment where we define who we’re going to be, how we’re going to operate, and how we’re going to connect and relate to each other.”
“So, the three big tension points we see in every culture are confusion. There’s confusion about where we’re headed, the vision, who we’re trying to become, what we’re trying to accomplish. There’s resistance to the systems or structure that’s in place, the changes you’re trying to make. And there’s conflict within the relationships. These tension points are showing up all the time in cultures.”
“The first step in building your culture is the vision of where you want to go. And I think this is the missing piece that so many coaches forget about or gloss over. We immediately go into what are our values, what are our rules, what are our standards? And we lay out this policy handbook of how we’re going to operate. And they miss capturing the imagination, the captivating vision that gets people engaged and on board with the mission.”
“It’s not the list of rules and standards and values. You first have to start with a vision of where you’re headed, who you want to be. And this is best captured in an analogy, in a metaphor, in a picture. Our brains work in pictures and images and stories and metaphors. What’s the story? What’s the metaphor that captures the vision of who you want to be? This is how you’re going to draw people in emotionally. This is how you’re going to draw them in intrinsically. What is the vision of where you’re headed? That’s the starting point of every culture. And then we build the systems and structures to support the vision.”
“Here’s the key truth in all of this. Your players are not a blank canvas to be written on. They’re a painting to be studied. And so, the approach where it’s my way or the highway, I know what’s right, I know what’s wrong, and you’re going to live up to my standard, rather than a cooperation of understanding who this player is, their background, their experiences can be a problem. Is there a third way? Is there an innovative approach I can take to draw the best out of this person so he or she can be at their best and he or she can amplify our culture and make our team better?”
“There are only 3 car wrecks you’ve got to pay attention to and worry about. Are we off vision? Are we broken in system or structure? Or is there damage in relationships? If someone is off vision, that requires full attention engagement. We need to get back on track. We need to get back on the same page. You’ve broken a system that’s in place. So that we can get to that vision, we need to intervene, either reinforce the system or we need to improve the system to upgrade with our team. Or we violated relationship, trust, and health. That requires our full intervention.”
“The rule serves us. It’s not the other way around. The rule is in place so we can accomplish the vision. But do we need to upgrade the structure? Do we need to upgrade the systems? So, it’s constantly tweaking the knobs, right? We’re sound mixing live as the season goes along.”
“The vision’s been cooking in your mind for a while. You’ve thought about it, you’ve wrestled with it, you’ve tested it, you’ve asked other people’s opinions about it, you’ve convinced yourself it’s the way to go, and now we’re going to go for it. But then we tell the players once, ‘Here’s the vision, here’s where we’re headed’, and then expect the engagement to just happen forever. The problem is, as soon as your players walk out of practice, what are they doing? They’re right on the phone, they’re scrolling social media, they’re getting inundated with a million other messages, they’re comparing notes with their friends, they’re talking to an agent. It’s like your vision is gone the moment they left the locker room. Next day, you’ve got to reignite the vision. You’ve got to say it again. Why are we here? To get better at basketball.”
“We have a script to lead your staff through an exit interview, basically an evaluation of what happened this season and where you go from here. The first step is to be honest about reality. Face the pain of the moment. Don’t rush past it with false optimism. Let’s be honest about where we’re at.”
“What are the systems and structures that need to be in place to get there? Just acknowledge what’s our biggest problem? What’s the root cause of what’s going on right now? If you notice that problem, then challenge yourself. What’s the innovative solution? What’s the innovative approach? Where do we need to expand our mindset and come up with a new idea to tackle this problem? Or are we just going to keep beating our head into the wall and complain that the players aren’t the same as they were before. Let’s find a better approach.”
Bret Burchard Breakdown:
Bret Burchard Selected Links from the Podcast:
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