What is Culture?

Phil Muller, US Sailing Youth Performance Manager, seeks to define a vital variable for success:

The word ‘culture’ gets tossed around a lot in team environments. Often lauded as the winning ingredient to success, or the issue at hand when individuals struggle to find successful paths of communication or collaboration. When team dynamics are fraught with tension, culture can be the invisible hand at play.

Culture cannot be identified from a uniform but can be obvious from the team’s “look.” Operational tempo, the tenor of banter, focus among teammates, the intensity of training, and conduct while at play are indicators of a team’s culture. Team culture displays to outsiders, newcomers, or those who step out of bounds “this is how we do things around here.”  It is the glue that binds a group of people together.

To me it all comes down to one thing, does everyone care as much as the other person? If we all care about learning and improving, and if the coaches can guide each teammate through their own stages of development, the team will thrive.

Will there be problems? Of course. Teenage athletes are growing into young adults, and growth is tumultuous. Learning is hard, and in sport the lessons take a physical and emotional toll. But youth athletes are resilient and capable of pushing themselves to an incredible level of focus, physical strain, and soul-crushing growth if supported by their team. This is what ‘culture’ is all about.

In many ways the modern generation has more emotional literacy and experience with receiving feedback that the previous generation. This challenges modern coaches to expand their skillset beyond the hard-skills of just sailing technique and execution, but into the soft-skill areas of intrapersonal skills and communication especially in doublehanded classes.

In my experience from building teams, cultivating a strong team culture is slow and painstaking work. It’s more like gardening than bricklaying, and the team’s leadership can’t just stack a list of goals, ideals, and core values on top of one another and expect team members to fall in line.  Culture creation takes time. Ideas must be planted, propagated, and pests (re: distractions) need to be weeded out.

Culture emerges from within the group and comes from thousands of small moments that have part to do with the head coach and much to do with team members who keep their peers in check. It all comes down to these culture keepers.

Top performers may often think of themselves as the team’s leader, or culture keeper, and tend to operate with a degree of self-entitlement or self-appointed-ness that limits the connection they make with all their teammates. But the true culture keepers are members of the team who are consistent performers but not exclusively a top performer at all times. Respect up and down the ladder is key.

Culture keepers are able to hold the memory of their own struggles and help others through progression with patience. Culture keepers give space and time to those who need it. They offer small corrections to teammates in subtle ways to keep the group moving in the right direction, “yo, chill;” “not like that;” “let me show you;” and other guiding commentary can be heard from these individuals.

Culture keepers want to see their performance improve just as much as the top dog, and often attribute their earned success in part to the entire team’s. The head coach can weigh in at certain times so the culture keeper isn’t always burdened with the role of team police. At the end of the day if there needs to be a “bad guy” it should be the coach, and not a team member. A coach who pays attention knows when to let things play out or when to intervene on an issue.

Pairing a culture keeper with an emerging talent can help the team culture proliferate. When recruiting a new sailor, or fast tracking a new team member, I rely on my culture keeper to show them the ropes.

So how do you build a team culture you can be proud of? In an exhaustive 2019 study, British consulting firm, People Academy researched over 200 Olympic programs and businesses to identify the key performance indicators of their organizations. That work became the 5 principles of high performing teams, which can be read as a recipe for building healthy team culture.