⏳ Read Time: 4 min

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📌 What’s inside:

• 💭 The myths: What most leaders get wrong about culture

• 📊 The research: What actually creates lasting culture

• 🛠 Five truths to build something real — starting with yourself

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📖 The Myth of the Magic Culture Fix

If you’ve worked in athletics long enough, you’ve probably sat in a meeting that starts something like this:

Everyone nods, ideas start flying, and someone inevitably suggests a new motto, a team retreat, or a book study. It all sounds good. But six months later, nothing has changed.

That’s because most leaders think of culture like a project — something you can fix, flip, or finish. But culture isn’t a banner, a phrase on a wall, or a one-off initiative.

The primary reason this fails is that we, as a collective unit of leaders in athletics, are unclear about what culture is in the first place!

Culture is like the air in a room.
It’s invisible, but everyone feels it. You can tell if the air is heavy, stale, moldy, fresh, or alive. You can describe what it smells like. You can’t really point to the source of what’s making the air feel that way. It affects how everyone in the room breathes.

This is culture. It’s easy to feel it when you have it and when you don’t. But its source? How to build it? It’s mysterious to most.

So, coaches are left to explain why their culture isn’t where it’s supposed to be. And they unknowingly blame the wrong things. It becomes really easy to believe myths about culture that just aren’t true.

📊 Research Insight: What Really Builds Culture

Research across both business and sport consistently shows that slogans do not define the strongest, most consistent cultures — they’re built by consistent leadership behaviors that reinforce clarity, safety, and alignment.

• Organizational scholar Edgar Schein describes culture as “the pattern of shared basic assumptions that a group learns over time.” In other words, culture is what gets repeated without thinking.

• Daniel Coyle, in The Culture Code, adds that three simple signals — belonging, trust, and purpose — are the backbone of elite cultures.

• And in a 2015 study published in the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, Cruickshank, Collins, and Minten found that successful sports teams establish culture intentionally through leader modeling and everyday behaviors — not motivational speeches or abstract values.

Put simply: culture doesn’t start with a message. It starts with a model.

🛠️ Putting It All Together:

If culture is built by behaviors—not slogans or speeches—then it’s worth asking: what behaviors are we accidentally rewarding or repeating that are getting in the way?

A lot of well-meaning leaders believe things about culture that sound good but quietly pull them off course. These ideas spread because they’re simple and comforting—but they’re wrong.

Here are five of the biggest myths about culture—and the truths that build something lasting.

🛠 The 5 Biggest Myths About Culture

How do we clarify it? In our view, when coaches discuss culture, they’re really talking about two separate things:

• Performance Culture

• Relational Culture

You can read more about our distinction between the two and why it matters in a BETTER Letter we wrote a few months back.

1. Lie: Culture is something you have.

   • Truth: Culture is something you do. It’s not static or owned; it’s expressed through daily actions, not laminated posters. Every email, meeting, and huddle reinforces what’s real.

2. Lie: Culture starts with the team.

   • Truth: Culture starts with you. Your habits, tone, and consistency shape it more than any talk about “standards.” Culture flows from leadership behavior outward.

3. Lie: Culture is about being liked.

   • Truth: Culture is about being aligned. The healthiest teams aren’t the most comfortable — they’re the most connected to a shared purpose.

4. Lie: Culture can be fixed in the offseason.

   • Truth: Culture is maintenance work. It’s built and rebuilt every day — in wins, losses, and everything in between. It’s more like weight training than remodeling: you can’t stop without losing strength.

5. Lie: Winning creates culture.

   • Truth: Culture creates winning. And it sustains it when the scoreboard doesn’t cooperate. Winning reveals culture; it doesn’t build it.

🏁 Conclusion: Lead Yourself First

Culture isn’t a slogan. It’s a mirror — one that reflects your leadership habits, your clarity, and your consistency.

If you want to build a culture that lasts, start by leading yourself with the same intentionality you expect from others.

That’s precisely what our new PowerBook, You Are The Culture, is about — practical tools and reflections to help leaders build the kind of culture that outlasts results.

Pre-Order Our 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 PowerBook 1 - You Are The Culture
🎥 Access to our monthly leadership webinars inside the BETTER Community
📗 A physical copy of Lead Yourself First when the full section is complete

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