Culture magic
Take home message
A GREAT CULTURE MAKES THE JOB EASIER.
For Coaches
You know it’s critical - the greatest teams have it. The process is really hard, but worth it.
For Athletes
You have an important role to play, not just the coaches.
One perk of travelling is the opportunity to network and meet new friends. On a recent tour I was fortunate to visit a club that I’ve respected from a far for a very, very long time (although my wife insisted, it is in fact a crush). What a relief to find out that my “crush” was well placed with the visit being everything and more!
As an ageing coach (I’ve got to be on the other side of the average S&C age by now), it’s interesting how conversations change. Two and a half hours with the club High Performance staff and barely a word on reps and sets or their favourite Olympic lift.
But we talked systems, processes, standards and culture only finishing when the lights got turned off! To me, it’s no surprise they are one of the most successful teams of any professional code.
Perhaps over simplistic, but I don’t consider reps and sets to be a discriminating factor. Sure, there are good and bad programs, but you can find plenty of bad programs that produce results, and good programs that don’t work. And just as much as “good cattle” help, there’s a special sauce, a critical ingredient.
Culture.
Now I know everyone throws culture around as a magic formula. But I don’t think it’s magic. It’s just hard.
Really hard.
And it always requires work, like an unfinished sculpture.
Plus, if you want to have the secret sauce, you’ve got to work hard to make it and even harder, much, much harder to keep it. It’s again similar to: hard decisions, easy life; easy decisions, hard life. Make the easy decisions to ignore poor culture and you are going to have a hard time. Make the hard decision to pull someone up on a less than ideal behaviour (sometimes it’s a small as one minute late to gym, or having to borrow a pen in a meeting) and you get good culture.
As the HP Manager I visited said, their job is easier because of the standards. And especially the way the players enforce them. “If you think the senior players are tough, wait ‘till you play at this level!” was a line he quoted overhearing a senior player talking to a junior one day.
I’ve always thought that. The higher your standards and your collective agreement to upholding them, the more time you spend focusing on great tasks, and not discipling adults for being late, forgetting their book to the meeting or the gym for being messy.
Sounds simple. But very hard to do.
But the players are not bullies. I really like the way they explained it, and I’m trying to do this with my players. He said: “A senior player will grab the younger players and say, “that’s not how we do it here”, put his arm around the younger players shoulders and say, “Let me show you how we do it””.
Magic.
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Thanks again. BA.