S2 E6 That's How We Do Things Around Here: Making culture obvious to all

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You picked your captain carefully. You trust them. And somewhere in the back of your mind, you told yourself that having the right person in leadership means the culture is in good hands. But here's the thing: new research suggests that your captain and you are building completely different parts of your team culture. And if you don't know which part belongs to whom, you might be waiting for something to happen that was never actually yours to create. This episode is about what athletes say culture actually feels like, who shapes it, and the finding that should change how you think about your captains forever. Let's get into it. Welcome to Coaching Research to Results. I'm Beth Barts, the coach developer. This is one paper, three ideas, and two actions for tomorrow in under 15 minutes. This is the podcast where coaching research gets off the shelf, out of your notes, and into your practice. Let's go. The paper is called That's How We Do Things Here, an investigation into athlete perceptions of coach and peer leadership behaviors and team culture, published in the Journal for Advancing Sports Psychology and Research in 2024. The lead author, Corinne Zimmerman from Michigan State University, and colleagues Robin Vealy and Nicholas Myers surveyed 130 collegiate athletes across 17 NCAA teams in sports like volleyball, basketball, soccer, and field hockey. Here's what makes this study unusual. Almost all of the existing research on team culture and sport has been done from the coach's perspective, how coaches experience culture, how they change it, how they build it. Zimmerman and colleagues decided to ask the athletes instead. And in doing so, they found something more specific and more useful than a general culture is important finding. They found that culture has two distinct layers, and leadership differences are responsible for each one. Here's what they found. The big idea could be called the coach lays the foundation. What the research found is that athlete perceptions of their head coach's leadership behavior directly predicted the structural, organizational side of team culture. Specifically, how well information flows through the team, how productive team meetings are, how involved athletes feel in decisions, and critically, how athletes experience the interpersonal behaviors of the head coach. When coaches were studied in their practice instruction, communication, support, and giving positive feedback, athletes rated those democratic structural dimensions of culture much more positively. When coaches leaned autocratic, meaning top-down, with little space for athlete input, positive perceptions of leadership dropped significantly. You're not just running sessions. Every time you communicate information, give feedback, or shut down a conversation before it starts, you're laying the foundation that everything is built upon. Think about what the foundation looks like for your team right now. Okay, idea two. And this one might reframe how you think about your captains entirely. While the coach is laying the foundation, the peer leaders on your team are doing something completely different. They're setting the climate. The research found that peer leaders, and this is important, not just named captains, but anyone athletes themselves identified as influential, uniquely predicted the social and relational side of team culture. Specifically, the warmth and trust of the team environment. How much athletes felt their voice mattered and the overall morale of the group? Call this one the leaders hold the climate. Peer leaders who gave positive feedback predicted better climate and morale. Peer leaders who were democratic, meaning that they created space for teammates to contribute, predicted stronger feelings of involvement. And crucially, the climate and morale finding was not predicted by the head coach at all. Only by peer leaders. This means that you can have excellent structure with great information flow, productive meetings, clear systems, and still have a flat, disconnected team environment. Because the social warmth of the team lives in a layer you do not directly control. It belongs to the athletes. Idea three, and here's where the two findings come together. When the researchers modeled head coach behavior and peer leader behavior at the same time, both still mattered. But here's the twist. Over 40% of the peer leaders identified in the study were not the named team captain. The athletes chose someone else as the most influential person on the team. Call this one the two-story building. You have a foundation. That's yours to build through your own leadership. Above it is a second story of belonging, trust, and social climate, and it's being built by the people who may not be wearing the title you gave out. If you are only developing your named captains, you may be missing the people who actually hold and influence the culture of your team. Now, let me throw something else into the mix. McDougal and colleagues in a 2020 paper in the International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology argue that sports psychology has built a lot of its understanding on team culture on myths. One of those myths is that leadership and culture are as directly and cleanly linked as this study suggests. Their argument is that culture is far messier, more contextual, and more resistant to being shaped or understood through leadership behavior surveys than we tend to assume. In other words, the link exists, but it may not be as tidy a path model as it makes it look. That's worth holding on to. The Zimmerman study gives us a useful and actionable map, but the territory is always more complicated than the map. Using the findings as a starting point for your own observation, not as a formula. As an illustration of this, when Jamie, a pseudonym, was named captain, no one questioned it. He was organized, disciplined, and he'd earned the role the way that most people earn things. Steadily, visibly, through years of doing the right thing at the right time. What the coaching staff perhaps hadn't fully accounted for was what the group would feel like without Marcus. Marcus had graduated the previous spring, or so everyone thought, until late August when word spread that he had one more year remaining and was coming back. The team that had spent a quiet summer learning to function without him suddenly didn't have to. Marcus never wore the armband. He was never the one to lead the warmup or speak first before a game. But he was the one who remembered everyone's birthday, who stayed late to work with the youngest player on the roster, and who gave, in one of his teammates' opinions, the best hugs. Jamie ran the team. Marcus held it together. The two of them never spoke about this arrangement directly, but it worked. That season, the team performed well beyond expectations, driven in equal parts by Jamie's clarity and Marcus's warmth. Then, deep in a final season tournament when pressure was highest, Marcus was injured in competition and ruled out for the rest of the tournament. Something went quiet in the spaces between the hard moments. The bench was more subdued, the huddle shorter, the laughter slightly more forced. Jamie led with everything he had. And the lesson here is that leadership isn't one thing, and even the most capable captain can't always be both the compass and the fire. This week, action one is to have a different kind of conversation with your captains and with the informal leaders on your team. Not about performance and not about upcoming competition. Ask them one question. What does it feel like to be on this team right now? Then listen. Don't fix or redirect. Just take in what they have to say. According to this research, you're building the foundation and they're living on the second story. Find out what it actually feels like up there before you assume you know. Action two is called the 40% audit. Here's your most practical action and the one you can start today. Quietly, on your own, write down the names of the athletes on your team who others genuinely listen to, not the ones you appointed, the ones whose mood others read, whose opinion shapes the group, whose presence or absence changes the atmosphere. Now, look at your list. How many of those people are your named captains? If there's a gap, you've just found the people your culture development work has been missing. The one thing I want you to carry from this episode that team culture is not a single-story project, and the coach is not the only builder. You lay the foundation through your communication, your instruction, your feedback, and the space you either create or close off for athlete input. That matters enormously. But above it, there's a second story. The social warmth, the trust between teammates, the feeling of belonging. That story belongs to the athletes, and over 40% of the people building it right now may not be the ones you put in charge. Knowing the story that you're building and making sure someone is taking care of it might be the most practical culture conversation you have this week. I'm Beth Bartz, the Coach Developer. You'll find show notes and the full library of episodes at www.thecoachdeveloper.com. If any idea from today lands for you, like, subscribe, and share it with another coach this week. That's how research actually travels. See you next time. This podcast was produced by Anne Reifenstein at R, etcetera services. Original music created and recorded by Sean Patterson and Final Safari Studio.