We sit down with Justin Bokmeyer, Director of Basketball Operations for the Brooklyn Nets, to explore how great teams build sustainable, high-performance environments.
With a background spanning West Point, MLS Next, and the NBA Academy, Justin shares powerful lessons on leadership, systems thinking, and developing people-first organizations that thrive under pressure.
đ§ What Youâll Learn
- People Over Hardware: Why elite performance starts with hiring, aligning, and empowering the right people.
- Systems Thinking: How to connect decisions across departments to reduce silos and improve trust.
- Onboarding and Role Clarity: The overlooked key to alignment and long-term success.
- Decision-Making Frameworks: How Justin uses pre-mortems, decision journaling, and pushing decisions to the lowest level to build accountability and clarity.
- Military Leadership Lessons: Applying principles like shared mission, healthy ego, and accountability from West Point to professional sports.
đ Key Quote
âHigh performance is a people-first business. Get the right people in the right roles, and everything else follows.â
Tune in to learn how the Brooklyn Netsâ Justin Bokmeyer blends leadership, decision science, and culture-building to create environments where teams can grow, compete, and sustain excellence.
Transcript
Justin Bokmeyer 00:00
push decisions down to the lowest level. And I learned that in the military is the people closest to the ground, right? Like you hear those stories about a commander making a decision from a base far away. You’ve got to push those decisions to the lowest level.
And so that can go into any business or sporting environment as well as you’ve got to have the right people in the room. And you’re ensuring that you’ve got the right information at the right time to make those decisions. But if you don’t have that, that’s where you get that higher uncertainty, that higher risk.
Dan 02:02
And now, please enjoy our conversation with Justin Bachman. So Justin, we wanna start with this, given your former roles and all that you’ve done in your past, which we can get into, and then obviously what you’re doing now is go into the vital structures to high-performance environments. So things that have to exist in place to have high-performing environments exist, thrive, all those kinds of things.
Justin Bokmeyer 02:32
Yeah, awesome. I think it’s such a vital topic, especially in sports these days.
That’s what’s required to create these environments that are sustainable, successful, that actually care about high performance. High performance can go a lot of different ways, defined by a lot. But really, I always come back to something I learned in the military in that people is more important than hardware. And so it’s got to be a people first business at all times. So getting the right people in the building, in the right roles, doing the right things, that’s where it all starts.
Dan 03:06
Maybe if we could go into that for a second, because that’s obviously a lot harder to do, and thoughts and processes over the years of getting the right people into the correct roles and right spots and sort of your thoughts on doing that.
Justin Bokmeyer 03:19
It’s been a period of learning for me as I was in the military, then transitioned out of the military to the NBA, then to Major League Soccer, and then now to a professional sports team. There’s nuances and context around all of it, and so the ability to learn the different cultures, the context of the different environments has, in time, changed my way of thinking.
In some ways, other ways, it stayed the same. I’ve learned things later in life that I wish I would’ve known earlier around how you hire, how you select talent, how you look at skills that are important to the environment that I’ve been able to tweak and learn over time. I think my latest lessons have come from people like Tyler Cowen, Graham Duncan, some economists, investors, just understanding how they look at talent and seeing how I can apply that in different ways, and then taking a look at the military, especially from a special operations standpoint, and have had a chance to serve with some great mentors that I’ve been able to take a peek into how special operations looks at talent selection. That’s from a physical, psychological, holistic standpoint that’s really affected me and how I look at getting the right people in the room.
Pat 04:42
I know it’s nuanced and probably specific to the type of job, but when you look at trying to find skills important to the environment you’re in, are there generalities when you look at the environment that you’re looking for and trying to then match skill to that part of the environment?
Justin Bokmeyer 04:58
Yeah, absolutely. So I think some things that have lasted across the different environments, I’m a huge believer in systems thinking. So finding the people that can look at the entire environment and look how things are connected. And then you start to make the decisions off of that. And I think where you struggle and getting silos and not communicating effectively and not building trust is if you can’t have people that are able to do that.
And I think that’s one skill set that I’ve seen across the different environments is how can you look at the environment? How can you look at how things are connected, dependent on each other? And you see the bigger picture, but then how it flows into the smaller things. And I think those that can do well, especially within a sporting environment, you’re able to look at it from different lens, right? From a player, from a coach, from a exec, from a league level, from all these stakeholders, and then you can make the right decisions off of that. So that’s always been a key component of what I look for from staff, from the environments I want to be in.
Pat 06:03
And you talked about talent identification. You mentioned there, correct me if I’m wrong, like the psychological talent, their mental mindset, let’s say, what are the key distinctions you’re looking for or how do you go about evaluating their mental makeup?
Justin Bokmeyer 06:18
First, it’s very difficult and everybody’s still trying to do that, figuring out what’s the capacity for cognitive decision-making versus resilience when things get tough versus decision-making on the court, on the field, anything like that, I think is really tough. There’s some really great resources out now.
You’re trying to sit down with the person and figure out who they are. What are those experiences and learnings that have built that person and created and got them to where they’re at? It could be what are some hardships? What are some hardships that have created and forged that person that you’re hoping to then bring into your environment? That could be from a player standpoint or from just a staff member. I think those always build some unique robustness in people that can then come in and create those high-performance environments.
Pat 07:14
Justin, if you found the right people and I think in your unique position, you’re dealing with the office, you’re dealing with the staff, some players. How do you think about alignment and creating role clarity across all these different fields you kind of are touching?
Justin Bokmeyer 07:30
It’s a great question. I think the alignment and role clarity is critical. I think you lose trust when that doesn’t happen. You just get more ambiguity across communication. Each person just inherently wants to be able to go into an environment and know how to succeed and how to bring their best foot forward. And if you don’t have that clarity, that’s where you can get into trouble. And so it’s having one-on-ones and constantly checking in with your staff with different people, like, how do you ensure that happens? Whether that’s sitting down and formal, you want to say like job descriptions or something like that, or it’s just, Hey, here’s your role. Here’s the expectations. And then you’ve got some feedback loops, whether that’s through one-on-ones, whether that’s through written feedback or informal or formal that you continue to stay aligned in that, but it’s got to be a two-way street. You’ve got to be able to hear things that you’re not doing right as a leader and need to then adjust, and then you’ve got to set expectations and hold people accountable for doing their jobs. And that’s got to be clear, but I think that role clarity, there’s a great paper out from Andrew Murray did it on onboarding, but it starts from the onboarding process. You have to get onboarding right to be able to really start your foot off on role clarity. And that onboarding is something that I do think within the sporting environments, we don’t necessarily get right at times because of the fast pace, because of, you know, people moving in and out, but that is always a leader’s responsibility is that onboarding within your organization.
Pat 09:11
When you think about onboarding, what is important to you, the communication, the vision, I guess, what is it you’re deliberate about in getting right with the onboarding process?
Justin Bokmeyer 09:23
I think it’s ensuring that the person coming in, it can be at any level, feels valued, automatically is empowered to do their job. I think as long as that happens, and then has that agency to be able to make decisions and shape their role, I think is really important.
And that starts from the interview process to the final, like get in the building. So when they get in the building, they’ve got their equipment when they need it, right? They’re connecting with different people. They don’t feel isolated. They’ve already felt like, hey, I’m in the right environment. I made the right decision, you know, and that could be a player, coach, staff, exact anything like that. Starts from before you even get the person in the building, but then on day one.
Dan 10:12
Justin, tons of awesome stuff. You mentioned a couple people that I’m also fans of a little bit earlier and that’s Graham Duncan and Tyler Cowan. And I wanted to ask you about Graham Duncan for a second because I’ve heard him talk about in interviews the right grip and for those listening, he talked about the right grip on a golf club. If you hold it too tight, you’ll hook it. If you hold it too loose, you’ll slice it. I mean, it doesn’t matter for me, I’ll hook or slice it no matter how I grip it. But he’s talked about the right grip on situations and people and parts of your organization. From what you’ve learned from Graham Duncan and his thoughts on organizational control, what to have tight versus loose grips on within the organization, any other learnings or things from him there.
Justin Bokmeyer 10:54
That is a phenomenon. I think the biggest thing from him is how deep he goes with referrals. I think that is such an important part. That’s actually pretty unique in sports in that you’re never too far away from one person, right? Like, you know, people who know that person and can reach out, but going deep on references. So you’re doing reference check after reference check after reference check, really trying to go deep, deeper than just people being like, yeah, he’d be perfect for the job, right?
Yeah. Justin did well in his last job. He’ll crush it in that one. Like that’s not a proper reference check, right? They want to know when times get tough, how I act, how I lead, things like that. I think Graham Duncan has done that phenomenally, and he speaks out about how important it is to something like 40, 60, 100 reference checks per hire or some crazy number. Like that requires due diligence, and that means you care about the people you’re bringing into the building. And I think that’s a big thing that I don’t think I’ve done enough in the past. And one that I’ll always take forward is like, how do I effectively do that? How do I set up some systems for myself to do those reference checks? Even if I’ve worked with them or trust somebody, there’s always a chance to go deeper.
Dan 12:06
Duncan’s also talked about ego and like matching the right ego to jobs and people. And I think this part of like the whole reference checks and he’s trying to figure that out. In professional sports, there’s obviously egos everywhere. How are you thinking about matching healthy, correct egos to jobs and rooms and things like that? And just your sense overall on healthy egos within the whole thing.
Justin Bokmeyer 12:30
You use it right there. Healthy ego is absolutely good for the environment in the right context. It goes back to one of those situational, it depends, but sports is an environment that we need men and women who have that healthy ego that are confident in standing up in front of players, coaches, execs, others, where they can feel free to disagree or have that psychological safety to bring up risk. And you need that.
And you need that ability to be confident because there is a lot of ego. And I think from a player standpoint, I think there’s a lot of research out there that ego is a key characteristic that’s created champions and created these environments that breed success. I don’t think you always want that humility and that humbleness. It’s a key characteristic around different buildings, but I think having a healthy ego is critical in the sporting environment.
Pat 13:31
With any high performance environment, like sustainability is a key piece, trying to build sustainability. When we look at sustainability, how do you think about marrying the short term with the long term?
Finding success in the short term, but also building towards the future. The decisions are the key things you think that have to go into that tightrope act and balancing those two things.
Justin Bokmeyer 13:55
it’s a tough one. And I think I learned that more than anything when I was at Major League Soccer and just the academy environment, because when I was there, I oversaw MLS Next, which was the academy system. It’s essentially a 10-month season that the academies are in. And so winning and losing enabled them to get to different tournaments and win different awards, but inherently academy system is for player development. And so it was that weird position of we’re creating this environment where people are winning and losing, but we also need player development to be the core aspect. How do you do that?
The same goes with pro sports. You’ve got to develop your staff members, develop everybody throughout the organization, but everybody knows they’re there to win or lose. And so first it’s being clear on the objectives. You talked about some of the key accountability measures. If you’re not clear on those right away, then you’re probably going to fluctuate between the short term versus the long term, and it won’t be clear to anybody. And so having those right objective measures, whether those are KPIs or OKRs or things like that, like from a business standpoint, how do you create that in a sporting environment that’s clear that says, this is how we’re going to define success.
And we’re going to define success over a monthly basis, long term basis. And you can either go from a player standpoint, go to IDPs, and you can really hone in on the IDPs and how you look at development, versus then you’re really looking at measures over a three year period and when your trajectory is to make a playoffs or the championship or anything like that. And you’ve seen that now in college sport too. College sport used to be a real development environment, and that’s changed drastically as we’ve seen the NIL and everything take hold.
It’s interesting. I think it starts with the leadership. It does. It starts from the top and being very clear in where we define success. Otherwise, you’re going to get that ambiguity of like, hey, we’re here to just win the game versus we’re playing the bottom of the roster because we need to develop those players. And that happens a lot in the soccer academy environment.
Dan 16:46
Justin, this has been awesome so far. We want to transition now to a segment on the show we call Start, Sub, or Sit. We’re going to give you three options around a topic, ask you to start one of them, sub one of them, sit one of them, and then we’ll have some fun discussing your answer from there. So if you’re all set, we’ll hop into this first one. Let’s do it. Okay, we’re going to stick pretty close to some of the stuff we’ve been talking about, but this is going to be a Start, Sub, Sit around making tough decisions. And the Start would be what’s most important for a leader to get right when it comes to making a tough decision. So option one is the process before you make the decision. So kind of the pre-process before you’re going to make that decision. Option two is how you deliver that decision. Let’s say the immediate when you’re delivering it and say the next 24, 48 hours, directly the present of that decision. And then option three is the after action or the post-evaluation of whatever decision that that leader made. So Start, Sub, Sit, most important would be your start to get right, the process, how you deliver, or the post-evaluation.
Justin Bokmeyer 17:59
This is near and dear to my heart. So I absolutely love this starting process. And we’ll talk about that a little more. I’m subbing after action review and what happens posts, and then I’m sitting how you deliver it. I think the process and any Duke talks about the resulting aspect of it, right? And any Duke has been phenomenal in my education, any Duke, Farnham street, all that in my education around decision-making. And I think the process, decision journaling, putting together decision trees, pre-mortems, I am a huge fan of pre-mortems. I will always do that. We’ll always bring a pre-mortem into an environment that I’m in. But I think that process makes or breaks your decisions because if you get that right and then you understand that process and everybody understands it, you’ve got some clarity across the organization on how you do that.
Dan 18:56
Can you go a little deeper on pre-mortems and what those are?
Justin Bokmeyer 19:01
A professor, decision scientist, Gary Klein, there’s a really good article back, HBR, Harvard Business Review, around pre-mortems, and now it’s kind of morphed and developed, but the essential idea is really getting into a room and you’re saying, you’re looking into the future and you’re saying, here’s the project, or here’s where we’re at, and it’s failed. Talk to us about why it failed. You’re trying to get a list of all those things of, here are the reasons why this project has failed. Then you’re taking a look at the percentage and the likelihood that it’s going to happen, and then you start to prioritize that, and that can help you better understand some of your blind spots, but I strongly urge people to take a look at that and how you bring things to light because you’re gonna have the ability for people to speak up and to talk about things because you give them the openness, you give them the ability to say why something might fail and without any consequences.
Pat 20:02
In terms of when time is a factor and the speed of the decision is required, what would change within your process or what do you think about how you then process the decision?
Justin Bokmeyer 20:14
I think the severity or the consequence or Bezos talks about the reversibility of a decision like, can you go back on it pretty quickly? That affects the speed of it. I think you can shorten some timelines. How much information is continued to be gathered versus not, and how much the decision has to be made under uncertainty or anything like that. But the goal is, how do you create as little bias as possible. You lay out all the factors within the decision, and then you make it. And so this can be from any part of an organization. This can be from a people, a business side, sporting side. And then I really think you’re deciding, hey, should we go gather more information? Do we have enough to make that decision? Or do we need to continue to look at? Because you can just go into information overload.
Dan 21:04
When you talk about risk and trying to filter out as much risk versus live with the risk within this process of trying to make tough decisions, what is the view on how much or how little you’re trying to have within, let’s say bigger decisions, like small ones obviously have less risk, but just overall how much you’re trying to live with versus not.
Justin Bokmeyer 21:25
I think that’s all within context. I think if you’ve got the information that’s closest to the decision, you’ve got to push decisions down to the lowest level. And I learned that in the military is the people closest to the ground, right? Like you hear those stories about a commander making a decision from a base far away. And there are stories about that. You’ve got to push those decisions to the lowest level. And so that can go into any business or sporting environment as well as you’ve got to have the right people in the room. And you’re ensuring that you’ve got the right information at the right time to make those decisions. But if you don’t have that, that’s where you get that higher uncertainty, that higher risk is because you can’t just make that in a bubble in an office from somewhere else.
Dan 22:11
Going to your sub and that’s like the post evaluation and I guess just learnings from either your time in the military or what you’ve done since then of what a good after-action review looks like.
Justin Bokmeyer 22:24
Yeah. And this is where, you know, how we met and our friend, Preston Klein has done so well with after action reviews and taking that into different environments, but there’s such a need for feedback loops and those feedback loops are critical and that could be post game, right? Post season posts decision in your daily life, doing your own after action review for your own personal decisions, being clear in closing those feedback loops and after action reviews, you know, really talk about what, well, what didn’t and what would change in the future and Preston talks about and others.
I’m reading a book now by Angus Fletcher around story thinking, but the ability to tell stories around the decision around different things are really important. That’s how things resonate. That’s how things stick. And so that narrative around what you tell yourself around the decision and things like that really matter. If you don’t take the time to process, I get people in the room and talk about that and then learn from it in the future, then you miss out on everything. And so that’s the ability. That’s why I say sub it is because you always have to take those learnings and apply it to the future. Otherwise, you’re not compounding those skills. You’re not learning. You’re not growing as an organization, as a person.
Pat 23:52
When you go into these reviews and you talk about, you know, the ability to tell a story around the decision, are you coming in with maybe a story around that decision already or is it more after gathering the feedback than crafting the story as like the bookend of the decision?
Justin Bokmeyer 24:10
Thats a great question. My feeling is that everybody will come into that after action review with their own story about how that happened, right? So if you say something around a practice, right? Everybody’s got their different lens around how that practice went. They see players, they see coaches, they see the communication sticking to the practice plan. What are those drills? They all see it in a different light. Then you bring everybody together. They’re telling their story from their lens that sets up that really constructive dialogue between the stakeholders on what that is. The coach is going to see their practice plan different than a player, than an executive or a complete outsider bystander is going to see things differently. And so that after action review then comes in afterwards and you say, okay, how do you think practice went? How do you think practice went? What can we change? What can we adjust? But everybody will have their bias and their own story coming into it. Hopefully everybody’s on the same page as you leave it around what you can do better next time.
Pat 25:17
Justin, in these reviews, I know talking with Preston Klein, a lot is like question asking, but maybe early on when you’re building the culture or when it’s a new organization, how much do you think about the question asking versus telling sounds so hard, but if there’s like a standard that needs to be upheld and just like being forthright, like this is what I needed to do versus question asking, maybe early on in the process of building cohesion, building a culture.
Justin Bokmeyer 25:45
Yeah, I think it’s a great balance. I do. I think there is a balance where the leaders have to set the standard around that culture. And you’re saying, hey, here’s how it’s going to be, or here’s how we need it to be. And that’s just having a belief in yourself as a leader, belief in core members of the team, that you’ve got to uphold those standards for what’s best for the organization. So there’s definitely times for that where you’re not coming in and allowing people a question. And it’s just that balance. And it’s understanding when those times are.
Pat 27:07
That probably actually bleeds in well to our next start sub sit, which has to do on the topic of leadership and drawing on your past in the military. We’d like to give you three leadership considerations that you think are the most valuable that you learn from your time in the military. I’m sure there’s a ton of them. We hopefully narrowed in on three pretty good ones for you. But option one would be having a clear chain of command as the leader. Option two would be a shared mission, conveying the shared mission. Or option three would be accountability across all levels.
Justin Bokmeyer 27:45
to start in shared mission, I’m going to sub accountability and sit clear chain of command. I think it’s all around how do you want people to show up every day?
And if you’re able to do that, then you’re able to make it clear in what everybody should be doing in accomplishing that for the organization. That’s been a huge thing for me is I’ve failed. I’ve grown at this is being very clear around how people should show up every day. And if you can do that, you’ve built the trust, you get the right role clarity, you don’t have to micromanage because everybody understands that. Then that goes into the sub on the accountability. You do that, then the accountability starts to fall into place and job as a leader is to hold people accountable to those standards and to ensure that they are doing the things that you need them to do on a daily basis.
Pat 28:43
Outside of the obviously JAWS specific and their role, what do you value or what are you trying to convey in terms of how people should be showing up?
Justin Bokmeyer 28:51
I think it’s an understanding that the team, the organization, is bigger than themselves. I think that’s always a core quality that I’m looking for, that I want to be a part of, and that comes from the different environments I’ve been in. And then it’s also to be extremely competitive. I’ve always been a big competitor with playing lacrosse, with West Point, with just trying to always push myself and the team around me. And so that’s a huge part, is people are constantly trying to improve, not settling where they’re at. And so those are some things that I want people to show up and be doing, because then they’re just going to be able to take things further.
The goal for me always is taking different roles, is to ensure that the organization is set up better when I got there. But then it’s also, I want people to take my jobs. I want to be able to develop the next leader to take my job and put me out of a job. And that’s phenomenal. If everybody can be thinking like that, then you start to break down some of those silos, some of those things where people hold on tight too, and they don’t define themselves by their job or what they’re doing. And so that’s all part of the organization being bigger than themselves, and that shared purpose, that shared understanding of what’s going on.
Dan 30:13
Your sit, the chain of command, the balance between clear chains of command within great organizations and then sort of the flatter, more democratic approach to whether it is decision making, hierarchy, and I guess the balance of that, you know, the military chain of command versus organizations being flatter, where do you see that fitting in?
Justin Bokmeyer 30:34
I think you can still have that accountability, and role clarity, and flat organizations. You just have to be very clear on how that process happens. I think if you’re not clear in that communication, then you can get into trouble. You can get lack of effectiveness.
You can get people doing the same things over and over. And then I do think career progression is a big one. I think everybody wants to continue to improve and move forward. And I think the risk you run from a very flat organization is you’re trying to see what’s next, and you don’t really know what’s next. And that can create ambiguity on a daily basis. And you want people to show up and have that understanding if they do a great job, what that means, right?
Where if you see a clear chain of command, and you see that kind of hierarchy, you say kind of like a bureaucratic hierarchy, you kind of know where to go. You look at different levels. You don’t have that as much in a professional team organization versus the military.
Pat 31:40
On this accountability piece, we talked previously about evaluating your decisions. How do you think about evaluating your organizational processes? So we talked about like alignment. Is there alignment? Is there clarity? And going back and seeing, is it an error on my part and the clarity or an error on maybe the person you hired, I guess the processes you have in place to evaluate your processes.
Justin Bokmeyer 32:04
That’s a great question. I think that’s, it’s always interesting how you build processes out, right? You don’t want to continue to build processes that will then hamper your organization, right? That creates more red tape.
It’s finding that fine line and that balance between creating systems that allow for that to happen, whether that’s from a very business standpoint, like a quarterly business review, you don’t want to put in like a quarterly business review in a sporting organization that then creates animosity towards things or just extra work. But if you create that to understand like, Hey, let’s look at our personnel. Let’s look at where our gaps are. Let’s look at our key performance indicators. Are we trending right and things like that? So it’s taking the right process for the context of your environment. And I’m a lifelong learner. One of the books that I’ve gifted most around this exact thing is scaling people by Claire Hughes Johnson, especially in the performance director space, right?
In the high performance space, it’s because she does a phenomenal job in startups. She was at Google at Stripe and being able to scale from a startup to thousands of people. And how do you create these processes to look at your hiring process? What’s your daily reporting process, right? And so for me, it always comes back to how is it adding value? If you can add a process that adds value to somebody’s life or to the organization, and I think that’s always the lens you have to take a look at with throwing another system in or another process to evaluate, does it add value?
And it’s sometimes hard. You learn it the wrong way where I put in like a daily sync meeting and then everybody hates you for it, right? Because it’s 15 minutes that becomes a waste of time, or it doesn’t add value when you could just fill it in on Slack, then you don’t have to meet for 15 minutes. So it’s just finding that balance. It is as a leader, it’s hard to tinker with.
Dan 34:12
Justin, you’re off the start, sub, or sit hot seat. That was awesome. Thanks for playing that game with us. It was a lot of fun.
Justin Bokmeyer 34:18
Perfect. You guys came up with some good ones.
Dan 34:22
Thank you. Hey, we’ve got one final question to close the show. Before we do, really appreciate you making the time today, so thanks again for coming on the show. This was a blast.
Justin Bokmeyer 34:31
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. I appreciate what you guys are doing and really looking at how do we learn? How do we continue to grow and appreciate you having me on. Thank you.
Dan 34:39
Absolutely. Thank you. Justin, our final question that we ask all the guests is, what’s the best investment that you’ve made in your career?
Justin Bokmeyer 34:48
I go back to best investment I made was choosing to go to West Point to play lacrosse. I had a chance to go play at different places and really took a chance as a West Coast kid to try to make the team at Army, which was a perennial top 10 team, trying to be a kid from San Diego playing against a bunch of Long Islanders and East Coast kids. But that investment and choosing that decision has done everything for me.
I’ve met the greatest people I’ll ever meet in life. I’ve learned some of the toughest lessons. I’ve failed many times over, but that decision, that single decision to go to that school and invest in my sports career, who I am as a person has set off these chain of events to where I’m at today.
Dan 35:44
All right, Pat, hey, let’s hop right into this. Justin was great, loved hearing all his thoughts on just a ton of stuff today. So for our first takeaway, I’ll throw that to you. Yeah, so the first takeaway,
Pat 35:55
Well, of course, we usually start from the first bucket, kind of vital structures to high performance. And as he got into the people over hardware piece, I think just talking to like the talent evaluation and the hiring process, I thought he raised a number of good points and trying to really evaluate the environment and the skills that you need for that environment to thrive, I thought was a really good way to frame your hiring process or who you hire from there.
And then kind of jumping to another point that I really liked and I think he even mentioned too in sports that can get overlooked, having the right onboarding processes to really set the alignment, set the clarity, avoid ambiguity, and making sure that your hires are valued and empowered. We’ve had conversations in the past, like with coach Roy Rana, like the power of the first meeting. And I think that is another thing that maybe can be overlooked.
Dan 36:50
and we mentioned on the podcast, Dr. Preston Kline talked a little bit about, it was on our show and I think with us personally after our show too, talking about onboarding of first team meetings and bringing food and those kinds of things being really important.
Just to kind of add to your point, and I know Justin and I kind of nerded out for a second there on Graham Duncan and his vision and his view on hiring the right people for the right role and that you have to spend so much time on making sure you get that right because if you don’t, secondary consequences of putting the wrong person in the wrong role really affect your organization or your team. Graham Duncan talked about and then Justin was talking about how important that is to fit and match those things because once you do get those things fit and they’re in alignment, things flow naturally. And I think even just going quickly to the start subset when you talked about pushing decisions to the lowest level, if you have trust all the way down on who you hire all the way through your organization and you get that right, then the decisions that need to get pushed down that are closer to the situation, it’s just better. So I loved hearing him talk about that, the Graham Duncan stuff and then as far as just how much time goes into getting the right people and then of course the onboarding process which you talked about. I think that was a really transferable conversation wherever you’re at.
Pat 38:14
Yeah, what was so fun about this conversation and really looking through the lens of higher performance and you and me have been part of Programs Club where resources and finances play a major role in this ability. But when you’re in an environment that’s built with these structures that have the right place and you’re just allowed to do your work because you’re supported by others that are also taken care of and power to do their job and us, we’re just allowed to coach and we have the resources necessary.
It makes a huge difference and whether you win or lose, I mean, there’s other factors that go into that, but just being allowed to work and focus on your particular task goes a long way. And that was what I enjoyed the most about just like, yeah, how he thinks about putting it all together, getting the alignment.
Dan 39:03
Yeah, Bob Ritchie talked about that from Furman, the alignment all the way through the program a month or two ago on the podcast, which I kind of circled to similarly. And then I think just to wrap up the point we were talking about, going back to the Graham Duncan thing, I think I mentioned on the show, he talks about the correct grip, like on a golf club, the correct grip on organization.
When you don’t have the right people in the right spots, then you can hold things tighter and over manage people or micromanage people or when you have the right people, you can have the correct grip, I guess, on the organization or team.
Pat 39:38
Yeah, Dan, we’ll keep it moving, throwing it to you with the second takeaway of our conversation today.
Dan 39:45
Yeah, I thought Start Subsits was awesome. I just felt like the three of us could have just kept, I don’t know, I wish we would have had like four or five Start Subsits for him because they were home runs from his standpoint.
I’ll just go to mine and the decision making, tough decisions and the process versus how it’s delivered, versus the post evaluation. I find this conversation really fascinating. We can probably keep having it with different people because there’s so many parts to it. I really liked the pre-mortem discussion. We talked about getting in a room and talking about, okay, if this goes wrong before, like why? And trying to suss that stuff out beforehand. I thought that was really good advice and good stuff to think about. You have to take the time to do that, of course, but it’s probably well, well worth it for him. And it kind of bled into a little bit of discussion about risk and ambiguity and decision making. And if you and your core inner circle are doing these pre-mortems on major decisions and why it might not work and attributing this now maybe to game plans or recruiting or things like that for us as coaches, I think can probably help us quite a bit in seeing the possible missteps on our way to whatever plan that we have that we wanna do. And so I really liked hearing him talk about that as that’s part of the process is doing a pre-mortem.
Pat 41:04
Yeah. I’m really glad you asked the follow-up because I didn’t know what it was. I was trying to figure out how to spell it. So let alone know what it is. Really good follow-up. I thought, yeah, really interesting. He talked about decision journaling. I mean, he mentioned it in passing and I think in our conversation with Brittany Loney, we talked about decision journaling. And yes, I think that’s another good piece to continue to evaluate decisions if they were failed. Why, why not? The other part of the conversation I really valued was the after action review or post decision. And we were put in touch through Dr. Preston Klein with Justin and Dr. Klein talked about question asking and it’s something I’ve tried to incorporate. And I really enjoyed his thought though on, you know, as we’re always in these after action or you look at post game reviews and trying to ask questions, but also finding the balance where maybe earlier in the season or if a team continues to make the same mistake, we as coaches, of course, need to be clear, but also being clear and just kind of telling. It’s always interesting. It’s something that I’ve thought about and was glad I got the chance to ask him on just how you find that balance between should it always be questions, trying to get them to the right answer, but also just like, Hey, this is what needs to be done. You’re not doing it. And here it is.
Dan 42:20
Yeah, after action review discussion, we should have more because I do think there’s an art to it. Brittany Loney was great about it because the slippery slope potentially for us as coaches, if you get three, four, five, six, whatever, a number of coaches you got on your staff in your office after practice and wanna recap practice, how to make sure that it is concise and informative and doesn’t just turn into a complain fest about we need better players and what does a really good AAR look like that’s concise and actionable for the next day?
Would be interesting.
Pat 42:54
I agree. And on the concise topic, even with our teams, I think we’re all in the agreement, you don’t want to bog a team down with too much film.
And I enjoy the question asking, but how to be concise. I mean, of course, listen, it’s not like I’m with a team that we just, everyone’s, you know, piping up and sharing their opinion. But when you have those moments where they are engaging and answering your questions, but also balancing like, well, we don’t want to be in the film room for 30 minutes, you know, or maybe we should be, I guess is what I think about. Or maybe if the conversation goes so well on the question asking, do we even bother with the film, you know, does it have any value or everything’s an art and like trying to balance these things. But how much leeway do you give to the question asking or maybe trying to have a conversation dialogue versus all right, here’s the film, we got to get to the film, I got to show them or maybe I don’t. Then we also got to practice after film. And if we just sat in a dark room for 40 minutes, having a great conversation, maybe that’s something we should sit in, but that’s just always what I’m thinking about too, with trying to continue to just work through this question asking process and the conciseness of it.
Dan 43:59
I’ll just quickly on the end of this conversation one of my misses today not by Justin of course, but his sit how you deliver tough decisions I think there’s a lot in there, too. I mean, I know he sat it of the three I’m sure there’s a lot he’s learned about how you actually clearly concisely deliver Decisions and information and immediately following that yeah I think for us as coaches just always trying to be on point with how we deliver Playing time decisions or game plan or you name all the stuff we have to deliver There’s always stuff in there.
So if we have more time, I would have loved to dive into that
Pat 44:35
Yeah, no, same here. That was a miss for me too, because yeah, not every decision is going to be loved by your players or staff.
Dan 44:41
No. Pat, let’s go to our last takeaway. I’ll throw that back to you.
Pat 44:45
So my last takeaway will come from our last start subset, his leadership takeaways from the military. I’ll go to the end of our conversation where we just talked about evaluating systems and knowing if you’re applying the right processes to your environment.
We talked a lot about quarterly reviews or daily sinks and the best way to do them, not to do them. To me, it just got me thinking as we talk a lot about our cultures with our teams and how to check in, and we always talk a lot about conversations, whether in the office before practice. I also view those as ways to, as we as coaches can evaluate our systems, our processes, and just think about how often, what length, just continuing to always self-analyze. What is effective? What’s burdensome on the players? So I just liked hearing his thoughts there because it got me curious too about processes we can put in place to always kind of have the pulse on our teams, but not also rule with like an iron fist.
Dan 45:48
For sure. I think he started the shared mission on this one, right? Which I think we’ve talked a lot about with some of the great culture builders having that leading the way. I loved his thought on teaching people how you show up every day is just so important.
The storytelling aspect, I thought that was good too within this start sub sit. You know, you asked a good follow up about kind of crafting the story around tough decisions, things like that. He mentioned that being something he’s more and more interested in too, on just being a better storyteller in leading through tough decisions.
Pat 46:18
Yeah, I did like when I followed up on the mission, and one of his missions was just making sure that the people show up the right way. Right. That being crucial to the mission. For sure.
Dan 46:29
Pat we both kind of mentioned a miss not by Justin of course But is there anything else if we have more time could have went deeper on or other paths we could have traversed down
Pat 46:38
You know, I think structure versus freedom, I think we talked a little bit like the short term versus long term. And I think with a lot of coaches, we talked about to structure versus freedom, but how he views that balance in an organization as well. Again, I think we hit on in certain pieces, but going deeper on that.
Dan 46:57
For me, a pretty big miss air at the top of the show was accidentally saying just from the New Jersey Nets, right as we started recording. Too early in the morning, I don’t know.
Pat 47:10
You missed the heydays of the New Jersey Nets. You know, as a very hard New Jersey Net fan, you know, it was hard when they left the city.
Dan 47:18
Yeah, but I was even more excited when I learned he was from the Brooklyn Nets. So, he was from the present, not the past of Justin Buckmar. So, that was a miss of mine that Justin handled gracefully. So, appreciate him on that.
All right, we appreciate Justin for coming on. And this was such a fun interview today. Thank you everybody for listening. We’ll see you next time.