- The Great Coaches: Leadership & Life
- Posts
- Brendan Joyce
We explore leadership through the lens of high-performance sport, interviewing Great Coaches from around the world to try and find ideas to help all of us better lead our families, colleagues, and teams.
This newsletter contains the best ideas from those interviews.
We hope that you’ll find one or two things here that you can bring to your dinner table, locker room, or boardroom table for discussion.
Latest Interview
This week’s podcast guest is Brendan Joyce, who played for 13 seasons in the Australian National Basketball League before transitioning to a successful coaching career.
First helping the Ballarat Miners to win two CBA championships, Brendan then went on to coach more than 400 games in the National Basketball League, winning the championship in 2001 with the Wollongong Hawks.
Since then, his career has seen him coaching at three Olympic games; for two games he was Assistant Coach to the Australian Men's team, and then the Head Coach of the Australian Women's team (who he also lead to a bronze medal at the 2014 world championships).
Currently, Brendan is in Taiwan coaching the Kaohsiung Aquas. The team won the 2021/2022 T1 League Championship - securing his place as the first Australian Coach to win a national championship in Asia - and during the inaugural season he was also named Coach of the Year.
During our terrific interview, Brendan raised a number of key points:
The way he talks about finding the line when it comes to challenging people at the right level, and how consistency is a great tool in helping to achieve this.
The need for coaches to develop a high level of confidence and self belief in order to face criticism, yet also avoiding potential arrogance.
How he encourages players to find the balance between being aggressive to score, but also doing what they can to make the extra pass.
The link between good team chemistry, and clarity on roles.
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Leadership Insights
As a leader, coach, or parent, difficult conversations are par for the course.
With that said, it can often be tempting to put off (or completely avoid) some conversations in the hopes that issues will ‘solve themselves’.
In this clip from our interview with Justin Langer, former Head Coach of Australia’s Men’s Cricket team, he shares why having honest conversations is a vital part of coaching, and the impact that they can have on team performance.
If you like this, you can find more than 1200 other insight videos on our website, covering a variety of leadership topics such as setting up new team cultures, establishing team values, or helping others with their inner voice.
All of the insights are indexed, searchable, and can be downloaded to share. Some may require a one-time purchase or subscription - check the individual insight’s description for more information.
Leadership Skills
The idea of a ‘mentor’ can often be associated with images of young people at the very start of their careers, and as such more established professionals can dismiss the idea entirely.
Yet, as frequent listeners of our podcast will know, mentors have often played a significant role in the successes of the Great Coaches we interview, across various stages of their careers.
For this lesson on mentors and mentorship, we’ve compiled clips and insights from our interviews with 10 Great Coaches.
Throughout the lesson, you’ll hear our guests speaking about the positive, career-changing impact that mentors have made on their lives and successes.
From the critical, direct feedback that only a mentor could provide to the benefits of sharing your own experience as a mentor, listeners will quickly come to understand why so many coaches consider a mentor to be one of the most important resources that a leader could have.
Want to find more content like this? You can find lessons on a wide range of leadership-related themes and topics on our website:
Ideas
In last weeks Podcast we interviewed Cody Royle about his new book “Second Set of Eyes.” It is a terrific read, that I highly recommend.
“Coaching has changed. The old models of success are outdated and don’t match the massive sporting organizations of today. Winning in the current landscape is not about your individual brilliance; it’s derived from your ability to elicit collective greatness from a multidisciplinary team.”
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Partners
If you are looking to help Australian farmers this summer, then the Farmer to Fridge marketplace is for you. Their online marketplace connects local farmers to local consumers. You buy from a farmer that is close to where you live.
The meat comes from smaller farms producing cattle on mostly natural pastures that leads to happier healthier animals. The farmer gets a fair price and the price per kg represents fantastic value for you as well.
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