Jay Wright: Leadership Drives the Culture

In a Coaching U podcast, Villanova Men's Basketball Coach Jay Wright spoke about his leadership and how leadership drives the culture.

The culture has to start with the leadership and when you are a leader, you have the chance to define:

“How are we going to live?”

Not just how we are going to play basketball or how we practice but how we are going to live, and that is the basis of your culture.  Once you define that and you bring in people who want to learn that and want to be a part of that, then you build from there:

“How are we going to practice and how are we going to play in games?” 

But it starts with how are we going to live, how are going to treat each other; how are we going to wake up every day.

When we wake up every day, our most important characteristic is our attitude.  We try to teach that we control our attitude every day.  How we walk in the office and say hello to each other, how we treat the people who clean the office and the locker room, and how we treat the managers and making sure we say thank you to them.  We have to define that as leaders, and every day we have to be the keepers of the flame and make sure that it remains that way.  You don’t bring people in that change it - the people that come in have to learn and accept it.