Workplace culture
And what we can learn from sports teams
More often than not, it is hard to convey the importance of culture to leaders of organisations.
I find this completely understandable. It can be a vague concept, and its importance can be really difficult to communicate. Further, organisations are unaccustomed to measuring metrics around culture, and understanding the usefulness of their insights, unlike profits and losses.
There is one area, however, where I believe you can really see its importance: professional sports teams.
There are a select few teams that seem to win no matter what (or, in the case of my teams recently, lose no matter what). Some teams can go out and spend a lot of money on the best players and still get the same sub-standard results. Others get unheralded players and make them into solid parts of championship winning teams. In all of these cases, you can see the impact of a team culture on sustaining their success (or misery).
Below are a few case studies.
The Melbourne Storm
Rugby League in Australia and New Zealand has a salary cap, meaning that all teams have an allocated amount to spend on salaries, which aims to create a level playing field.
Despite this, in the current format the Melbourne Storm have either won the competition or come runners up eight times, while the majority of other clubs have won the competition one time or less.
As player value increases due to being part of a winning team, they naturally demand better contracts and pay knowing that another team can pay them what they want. Since the Storm cannot afford to pay them all, due to the salary cap, other teams in the league nab the Storm's best players.
So, the Storm find lesser known players from lower tier teams and turn them into stars. They also aim to develop youth players into the first team.
In a competition where other teams change coaches, players, owners and see the same results for decades, you start to listen when ex Storm players and their General Manager speak about how a winning culture is built there, like in the below video.
The Sacramento Kings
The National Basketball Association is another league where the salary cap and drafting system tries to create as much fairness as possible.
Despite that, some teams just suck. They suck so bad. One such team is the Sacramento Kings.
If you go on YouTube and search, "Why are the Sacramento Kings so bad?", you get a ton of results, even from just this year. The problem, however seems to be everywhere. Poor talent identification and development, bad contracts, poor leadership, a US $13million fraud scandal, strange coaching decisions... the list seems to go on and on. This year, they set the record for the longest playoff drought in NBA history.
When things get this bad, it seems that fixing one cog does not fix the whole machine. This is why you can see younger players for the Kings (and other teams) with so much talent, become shells of who they were, and do not live up to their potential.
Compare that with the clarity that goes around in creating a winning team in the league. Here, Steve Kerr talks about culture at the Golden State Warriors.
The All Blacks
Most well known for the haka and being awesome at rugby, New Zealand's National Rugby team have a historical winning percentage of 77%. In a recent five-year span, this went up to 94%. Pretty impressive for such a small country.
But digging deeper, you have players from multiple generations talking about what it takes to sustain success. The intense focus on culture, legacy, and values, both on and off the field. Check out the below video, which provides brief insight into their culture.
"Better men make better All Blacks"
I could spend all day going through lists of good and bad cultures in professional sports. I could go on about how Ash's team, Manchester United in the English Premier League, have also struggled mightily. However, before we get too carried away having fun, I’ll try to wrap up.
We set out to see how we get a better idea of why culture matters in organisations. The above examples have clearly shown that culture can lead your team to move closer to (or further away from) your objectives.
We have seen how a good culture can allow people to flourish and grow. It provides guidance and a clear example of how to act. In these cultures, more things seem to go right than wrong.
We have also seen how in bad cultures, a ton of issues seem to pop up. While these various problems can seem unrelated, they seem to be enabled and compounded by a bad culture. It can seem like everything possible that can go wrong, does.
So, without going into further detail about what culture is, sports teams, both good and bad, provide the perfect examples of how to reflect on the importance of culture in the organisations in which we work.
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