August 8, 2025

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Every week, I sit down to reflect on the events of the week, extract their lessons, and gameplan how to apply those lessons toward greatness and growth. It’s a system that has always worked for me, it can work for you too.

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Culture is King

Over the course of the last three years, a lot of my time has been focused on talking to people.

Based on my experience in professional sports, I get asked to speak to a variety of groups who want to know what it takes to win at a high level, and how to sustain that winning over a period of time. They want to hear the lessons I learned on my journey and see if there are any they can apply to their own organizations and their own goals.

A lot of the conversations we have come back to topics like leadership, consistency, and culture; since those are three big areas that I think help explain my success.

In this newsletter, I want to talk specifically about culture, about what I’ve learned over the years about how to develop a culture, and why it’s so important.

REFLECTION

I've been a part of several different, important cultures that shaped my experience. I was part of a high school culture with a lot of team spirit and a rich tradition of camaraderie around the school’s sports programs. At Michigan, I joined a great team-oriented culture full of high achievers that was very much focused, as Bo Schembechler said, on “team, team, team.” Then, when I was drafted by the Patriots, we were trying to rebuild and start a fresh, new culture under the leadership of Bill Belichick. When I went to the Bucs, I was adding to an existing culture that was quite a bit different than what I experienced in New England, but I learned so much about different ways to succeed. Now, I'm involved in other aspects of sports, as well as a number of great organizations, all of which have entrenched cultures where I try to make positive contributions however I can.

One of the ways I’ve done this is to spend a significant amount of my time and energy thinking about culture, mining my experiences, and figuring out how to communicate my ideas about culture as clearly and concisely as possible so that the people I speak to and the organizations I’m a part of can actually do something with them.

I believe this is an important and valuable thing to do, because conversations about culture are always fairly complicated, since culture itself can be as hard to define as it is to build. Everyone seems to have their own definition of culture, and they’re incredibly varied. Just google “quotes about culture” and see what comes back. They’re all over the place.

As an organization, how can you expect to align around your purpose and your mission, if you can’t even agree on how to define what you’re all about?

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LESSON

In my opinion, culture is the product of people and their values. To build a good, positive culture within an organization, you need to bring in the right people who have the right values, which you are trying to align with whatever the purpose and the mission of the group are.

In sports, the mission should be to win. So you need people who possess winning values. That means people who value hard work over less work; who value being a good teammate over their own stats and selfishness; who value being more committed over less committed; who value more communication over less communication; more resilience instead of less resilience. You get my point. In my example, you have to look for people who embrace these values and then you bring those people into your organization so that they can plant the seeds that eventually become your culture.

This all might sound pretty straightforward and self-evident, but dedicated, well-meaning teams who really care about culture get tripped up all the time by people who say they embrace the right values but don’t actually embody them. It’s one thing to say you believe in all the right things, it’s another to live them day in and day out.

One of the things we valued in the cultures I was a part of was accountability; which I believe is one of the best, and sometimes most needed, values in high functioning organizations. As one of the leaders on my teams, I held myself accountable to do my job in the best possible way. I never wanted to let any of my teammates down. I wanted to be the most prepared I could possibly be. I wanted to acknowledge and accept criticism whenever I made a mistake. What would it say about our culture if the coaching staff couldn't critique me in meetings when I screwed up? If we were truly going to have a culture of accountability, the coaches needed to be able to coach me and critique my play if it wasn't up to the standard, just like they would all the way down to the 53rd man on the roster. I had to be willing to accept their criticism, which I always was.

Too many times in sports, teams can have different sets of rules—one for the regular guys and one for the stars or the leaders. You can get away with that when you're winning, but it's fatal the moment you face any amount of sustained adversity, especially if the failure you’re confronting is the result of not embodying the values you've claimed to embrace. That's when the cracks in your culture reveal themselves. The locker room gets divided, the team starts to underachieve, and fingers start getting pointed.

This is also when the disease of “it’s not my fault” comes into play. It's so easy to point the blame at other people when things aren't going well and the culture is unaligned, especially the higher up you get in a sport or an organization or an industry. You have so many people around who empower you–your agent, your parents, your significant other–and their instinct when you lose a game, let’s say, is to tell you that the blame lies elsewhere. It's the defense, it's the offense, it's the coaching, it's the refs. It's never your fault. And you’ll want to believe them. They mean well, they’re just trying to support you, but in the end, they’re helping to create a kind of organizational injustice.

Saying “it’s not my fault” is never the right way to deal with adversity. The opposite is true, if anything. We have to say, “it is our fault and we need to fix it.” Then we have to ask, “how do we get to the solutions?” That's what a great culture is all about, and it starts at the top.

Leaders are the standard-bearers for an organization’s culture. It doesn't make sense when the people who build the culture, and are tasked to guide it, are the ones who break the rules. I talked last week about how kids watch everything their parents do. Employees are the same way. As a leader or a boss, if you set the standard and make the rules, but you then don’t live up to that standard and you break those rules because you think they don’t apply to you—everyone will see through it, and think that if you can break the rules, so can they. That's the fastest way for a culture to crumble.

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APPLICATION

The amazing thing about a good, strong, well-built culture is that eventually it becomes self-sustaining. Sure, in the beginning, the culture of an organization tends to be defined mostly by the people who have come together with the values you’re looking for. But as the organization grows, and the culture matures, and people begin to move up or move out, what remains are the values. They become the defining characteristics of the culture, not the people.

Now, when new people show up, like new hires in a business, they come into a culture where the expectation is not to keep up with the rock stars in the organization, but rather to match the values they embody, the priorities they set, and the actions they take. In my playing days, I didn’t want new guys coming in because they wanted to play with me, I wanted them to come in because we did things the right way. With a winning mindset. A “no bull” mindset. No bullshit. Go out there and get the job done, for your teammates and for the organization.

That’s the power of a strong culture defined by good, clear values. It’s self-selecting. You see it in organizations of all kinds. Opus Dei Catholics attract people of deep faith who value discipline, simplicity and humility, because those are the values of Opus Dei. The best investment banks don’t appeal to people with mediocre work ethic who don’t care about making money or having success. Those folks don’t share the values of the typical investment bank’s culture so they don’t even bother to walk through the front door. It’s the same with sports teams. You’re either cut out for the expectations of the Yankees clubhouse, or the Mercedes F1 team, or the Michigan football program…or you’re not. If you are, you find your way there naturally because the values they embody call to you. If you’re not sure, when you come into that culture and you see everybody living the values that define it, you try to embrace them and quickly embody them, or you struggle and eventually leave.

Whatever the case may be for an individual coming into your organization, if that’s how the process happens, then you know you got it right. You built a winning culture with values that transcend the people and deliver on your purpose.

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