- BETTER
- Posts
- Culture Is Built in the Moments You Avoid
Culture Is Built in the Moments You Avoid
What you tolerate quietly can become what defines your team.
Seth Kindig
December 18, 2025
⏳ Read Time: 4 min
📌 What’s inside:
⚖️ Why culture is shaped more by tolerance than intention
🧠 The leadership moments most people avoid
🛠 Five small decisions that protect culture long-term
Quick Note
We’ve heard from a few of you about issues with pre-ordering the book or accessing recent PowerBooks. If you’ve had any trouble, reply directly to this email, and we’ll make sure you’re taken care of.
In honor of PowerBook 3 - Balance Support & ChallengeWe'd love to hear where you fall on the Support-Challenge Matrix. All votes are anonymous. |
📖 Anecdote: The Easy Choice That Costs More Later
It’s not often that you get a close look at the personal dynamics and communication that impact locker rooms at the pro level. But, we did this week!
Most leaders don’t lose culture in big, dramatic moments.
They lose it quietly.
It’s the comment that gets brushed off.
The behavior that gets explained away.
The conversation that gets postponed because “now’s not the right time.”
The standard that slips because everyone’s tired, busy, or stretched thin.
What transpired instead was a toxic combination of miscalculations, miscommunication and shocking underperformance from a team many had picked as a dark horse in the loaded Western Conference.
In the moment, avoidance feels like the easy choice.
It keeps the peace.
It avoids discomfort.
It buys a little time.
But over time, those moments stack.
The problem isn’t that coaches or leaders in teams where issues like this happen are doing something wrong.
It’s the lack of intention that slowly causes drift that, eventually, you turn around, and you’re too far gone.
And slowly, unintentionally, culture shifts.
Culture isn’t built by what you emphasize.
It’s built by what you tolerate.
📊 Research Insight: Why Tolerance Becomes the Standard
Organizational culture research has been remarkably consistent on this point:
Stated values don’t define culture. It’s defined by repeated behavior.
Edgar Schein, one of the foremost scholars on organizational culture, defines culture as:
“The pattern of shared basic assumptions that a group learns as it solves its problems of external adaptation and internal integration.”
In practice, that means culture is formed by what leaders respond to AND what they don’t.
When behaviors go unaddressed, they aren’t neutral. They become signals.
This is reinforced by research on norm formation, which shows that groups quickly infer “what matters” by observing consequences:
What gets corrected
What gets ignored
What gets reinforced over time
Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety further supports this. Her research shows that teams don’t lose trust because of hard conversations — they lose trust because of uncertainty. When leaders avoid clarity, people fill in the gaps themselves, often assuming the worst.
In other words:
Silence is not neutral.
It teaches.
Leaders don’t just shape culture through what they say.
They shape it through what they allow to continue.
🛠️ Putting It All Together:
💡 5 Leadership Moments that Quietly Shape Culture
1. The behavior you ignore becomes permission.
When something goes unaddressed, people assume it’s acceptable — or worse, expected.
2. Speed matters more than severity.
You don’t need a big speech.
A timely, calm correction protects culture far more than a delayed overreaction.
3. Private correction protects public culture.
The healthiest teams address issues early, one-on-one, before they ever spill into the group.
4. Consistency beats intensity.
Occasional passion can’t make up for inconsistent standards. People trust leaders who respond the same way — every time.
5. Avoidance always shows up later.
The conversation you don’t have today becomes the problem you can’t ignore tomorrow.
🏁 Closing Thought
Culture is shaped just as much by the conversations you plan as it is by the ones you hesitate to have.
Leading well doesn’t mean being confrontational. It means being clear, timely, and steady, especially when it’s uncomfortable.
What you protect today becomes who your team is tomorrow.
📣 Keeping Up With BETTER
🎙️ The CALS Podcast!
We joined the CALS Podcast — one of the top executive development groups in NCAA Athletics — to discuss leadership identity and culture. (Our section starts at 52:03)
🏐 BETTER at AVCA
Seth and MAYBE Kevin will be at the AVCA Convention during Volleyball Final Four week. If you’re attending, reply and let us know — we’d love to connect.
📘 PowerBook 3 Dropped this past Monday!
For those of you who have pre-ordered, you’ve got it already. It was uploaded directly to our Access Page for all things PowerBooks.
We are working to have all of Lead Yourself First ready for purchase on Amazon.
Download our FREE Digital PowerBook: You Are The Culture!
You Are The Culture is the first chapter of our self-leadership system for coaches called Lead Yourself First. We’ve released two chapters so far. The first is below. The second PowerBook, "Know Your Voice, Coach From Identity," includes an implementation guide as soon as you pre-order our book for $10!
|
Pre-Order The Full Book: Lead Yourself First!
When you pre-order, you’ll get:
✅ Immediate access to the next two PowerBooks as soon as they’re released
🗒️ A downloadable implementation guide for PowerBooks 1 & 2
🎥 Access to our monthly leadership webinars inside the BETTER Community
📗 A physical copy of Lead Yourself First when the full section is complete
🛠️ Want to Build Elite Culture?
Get BETTER’s Culture Playbook. A system designed to install a thriving, healthy, high-performance culture. Join over 1,000 coaches who use our Culture Playbook from youth club teams to national championship NCAA programs and everything in between.