Building a Championship Culture Training Camp
“I have found that without a healthy culture, without being very intentional about creating culture, there is no success.” Dr. Michael Brown has advised elite professional organizations for 25 years and he currently works with the athletic departments at universities such as Bowling Green, Michigan State, and Ohio State. He believes that it is possible for teams to have some short-term success without a strong culture, but that culture is essential in building an enduring championship program.
Dr. Brown has spent his entire career studying the importance of culture. He states, “As I have spent time with athletes and coaches, I’ve been thinking long and hard about this idea of culture.” In the GameChange digital Training Camp, Building a Championship Culture, Dr. Brown teaches what he learned and offers various suggestions for how to build a great culture.
So, what exactly is culture? Dr. Brown explains, “Within every team, there is a culture, a culture of beliefs and core values and norms. It exists whether we create it intentionally or allow it to spontaneously just erupt.” What Dr. Brown advises leaders to do is take a thorough and intentional evaluation of what kind of culture they want their team to possess because it is not something that should just be left to chance.
The desire to help teams build strong cultures inspired Dr. Brown to create a program that features various important ingredients. He shared the program with GameChange. Here are a few of the steps that can be found in the Training Camp.
Connection and Care
Dr. Brown asks, “Do you have a deep connection with your athletes? Do they really feel connected to you, and you connected to them?” Every single player on the team should feel like the coaches and their teammates truly care about them. Think about your team. Can you say with certainty that this is the case?
Challenge and Correction
“We want to push our teams. We want to challenge our players to achieve their absolute best,” states Dr. Brown. Challenging your players and team to be their very best should be a part of every championship culture. To achieve this, a player’s actions or behaviors will often need to be corrected. That is an important part of coaching. However, being told you are doing something wrong can be hard to take. It’s important to understand that players who don’t feel loved will often not respond well to feedback, even if it’s constructive.
Celebrate
There is no question that a good coach can find the areas where a player needs to improve and coach them up. However, it can become pretty deflating to a player when they only hear what they’re doing wrong. Dr Brown advises, “There needs to be celebration because what typically happens within unhealthy cultures is we’re always saying, ‘This is a thing we did wrong.’ But what if we regularly said, ‘These are the things we did (right)?’”
This can be especially true after a tough loss.
Shallow thinking coaches are so predictable. Go in the locker room after a victory and it’s all, “Rah-rah, we’re the best!” After a loss, it’s screaming and kicking chairs. Dr Brown states, “Imagine… after a loss, we celebrate simultaneously while grieving, while saying, ‘Man, that was hard. That loss hurts, but here’s what I’m celebrating today, athletes… We did this and we did this, and we’re growing here.’”
A team knows the things they did wrong after a loss, and they deeply feel the pain of those mistakes. It is those hard times that offer a good opportunity to build trust, relationships, and a shared dedication to improve. That’s what championship culture looks like.
