NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  It’s our chance to meet with you and discuss what really matters in the world of project management, whether you’re new to the field or have been doing it for decades.  We want to encourage you and challenge you, to cheer you on and help you avoid some of the pitfalls that can come along the way.  We talk to the experts, people who have gone before us, so we can benefit from their experiences and their successes.

I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are the guys who make it all happen here, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.

ANDY CROWE:  Nick, it’s great to be here today, and I’m really excited about this ‘cast.

NICK WALKER:  Okay.  Spoiler alert, it’s very possible that we’re going to laugh some today.  Our guest is Sean Glaze, an author, speaker, and teambuilding facilitator who is all about inspiring groups to have fun laughing together so they can have more success working together.  He’s the author of three books:  “The Unexpected Leader,” “Rapid Teamwork,” and “The 10 Commandments of Winning Teammates.”

Sean has been a successful basketball coach, an educator for more than 20 years, and in that time has gained some valuable insights into how to develop winning teams.  He’s the founder of Great Results Teambuilding, which he uses to share those lessons all over the country, through entertaining speaking engagements and teambuilding events.  Sean, thanks for joining us here on Manage This.

SEAN GLAZE:  Appreciate it, Nick.  Looking forward to being here and sharing some great information with your audience.

NICK WALKER:  Sean, I’m always fascinated how skills developed in one area can transfer over into others.  For example, when did you realize that the lessons you’ve learned from years of coaching basketball could translate well to business leaders?

SEAN GLAZE:  That is a tremendous question.  And honestly, it was probably about eight years into my coaching career when I realized I wasn’t as good a coach as I thought.  I had spent most of that first decade as a coach, like many project leaders, like many team leaders regardless of industry, focused on strategy.  And for basketball, that’s X’s and O’s, and that’s skill development and strategy.  And you realize after you go through a couple of seasons where you know you’ve not gotten as much out of your talent as you should have that there’s something missing.  And what I had neglected for nearly a decade was culture.

And everybody has probably heard culture eats strategy for breakfast, but as a young coach I had never heard that.  But I certainly lived it.  And so the eye-opening mirror moment for me was recognizing, at the end of a really tough losing season, I’m going to have to change if I want my team to change.  And leading teams as a project manager, as a coach, you realize that strategy is what you want to do.  Culture determines how well your people are going to do it.  And so the relationships and connections that I then began to focus on made us far more successful in the future.  And I realized that what I had done with my team could hopefully help other leaders with their teams, regardless of athletics or business or others.

ANDY CROWE:  You know, as I listen to this, Sean, I’m thinking, strategy you could change over a long weekend.  But culture is a slow turning ship a lot of times to turn that around.  And especially if you’ve got a toxic culture or a problematic culture, to reframe that in a positive way takes a lot of time and tremendous energy.

SEAN GLAZE:  Absolutely.  And that’s something I think first as a leader you need to know what it is you want.  Because if I don’t have clarity about what I want my culture to be and what actually constitutes culture, I can’t deliver that or influence that on my team.  So a lot of my growth as a leader was me educating myself.  And hopefully those are some things that I’ll be able to share toda...