Why Team Cultures Drift (And How to Prevent It)

Most organizations and teams don't fall apart suddenly or due to some catastrophic collapse. Typically, things start to break down in more subtle ways and due to small deviations from standards. Drawing on insights from Northwestern Field Hockey Head Coach Tracey Fuchs, Zach discusses how championship teams leverage regular culture audits to evaluate whether their actions align with their values. He also explores research from systems thinking to explain why drift occurs and what leaders can do to prevent it.

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Transcript

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Most leaders spend a lot of time defining and setting the foundation for their team or their program's culture, but they often lack checks and balances to ensure that they're still living their values and their standards. And this is where problems can begin to emerge. In systems design, there's a concept described as organizational drift. Every season, coaches and athletes experience their own version of this at an individual level. But organizations and teams encounter this challenge too. The truth is that most organizations, they're not going to fail all at once. They oftentimes drift with one small decision at a time. So today on the podcast, we're going to discuss organizational drift and how great leaders prevent small deviations from becoming major problems for their teams and their programs. Hey coaches and leaders, I got a quick question for you. You spend a lot of time building game plans for those you lead, but when was the last time you built one for yourself? If you're looking to sharpen your leadership skills, strengthen your team culture, or find better ways to support and challenge your athletes in the mental game, I'd love to help. I'm offering a free coaching call where we can talk through your current challenges and create a simple game plan for what might move the needle most for you, your players, and your program. Most coaches I know obsess over developing their team, but they neglect the person in the mirror. This call is a chance to invest in you because a better you is going to produce a better them. And if that sounds helpful, you can grab a time at Callanly.com slash Zach Brandon. That's Callanly.com slash Zach Brandon, or just check the link in the show notes. I'd love to connect and explore how I can best support you. Now on previous episodes, I've talked about drift at the individual level. All of us experience this slow and subtle drift away from our goals or the person that we aspire to become. Each day we have to fight this gravitational pull that invites us to compromise on things that we say matter most, or the standards or the discipline that we know it will take to actually achieve our dreams. But today I want to talk about drift at the collective level because organizations drift too, especially if a leader hasn't intentionally created a system to check in with the team and ensure that they're moving in the right direction. There's a multitude of ways that you can combat this drift at a team level. But in my conversation with Northwestern field hockey head coach Tracy Fuchs, she shared a very simple and important reminder for how a coach might address this with their team. During our interview, Tracy described the four core values that embodies the team and her program. And she emphasized how every quarter she and the staff and the players will audit how well they're living up to their standards and values. Here's how she explained it.

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So what we do is once a quarter here at Northwestern, we'll review them, we'll split up into groups, we'll say what we're doing well, what we're not doing well. And then as coaches, we'll throw them into the game plan. Like, okay, how can we be more relentless in the circle? Well, we can decide, we can do this, we can tackle back really hard, you know, how can we show accountability? Well, we can watch film, we can do the extras, we can teach um this first year, you know, some of the tactics that you know they might not brush on, brush up, need brushing up on. Um, so I do think that you know, if you asked our team, they they we maybe not talk about them every day, but by the end of the week, we've hit a value or two. And um I I think it's pretty consistent across our whole team that they know the behaviors that, you know, match each value.

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Now, what I love about this isn't simply that the Northwestern program has clearly defined core values. A lot of teams have values. A lot of leaders can tell you about what's important to them. The difference is that Tracy and her staff have actually built a system for returning to those values repeatedly, especially when they start to deviate from them. Now, there's a safety researcher by the name of Sidney Decker who's wrote uh extensively about what he calls drift into failure at an organizational level. And his argument is simple. Organizations will rarely experience failure because of one catastrophic decision. Instead, they gradually migrate away from their intended standards through a series of small adjustments and compromises. Each deviation will feel harmless, but over time they accumulate, and eventually people find themselves asking, well, how did we get to where we're at now? Because this is nowhere near the organization or the team we know that we're capable of being. Sociologist Diane Vaughan observed something similar while studying the Challenger space shuttle disaster. She coined the phrase the normalization of deviance. In other words, behaviors that would have been once considered unacceptable had slowly become accepted because nothing bad happened the first few times that they were compromised. The deviation becomes the new normal, and that's where drift can get dangerous. The small deviations will compound, and that can also take place inside of a culture as well. Nobody wakes up one morning and decides, let's become disconnected, let's lower our standards, let's stop holding each other accountable, and let's move away from our values. All of that can oftentimes happen, and most of the time does happen very gradually. A behavior will all of a sudden get tolerated that wouldn't normally get tolerated, a standard might get overlooked or just not applied to everybody the same way. Maybe it's a difficult conversation that's all of a sudden getting delayed and people aren't being held accountable. And then those things happen again and again, one after another. And eventually the culture that people are experiencing no longer resembles the culture that they intended to create. Tracy's quarterly audit for her program is valuable because it's a pause, it's a checkpoint, a moment to step back and ask, what are we doing well? Where are we falling short? And are we reinforcing our values? Are we drifting away from them? One way you can think about this too is like to imagine your trajectory. So if we continue doing what we're currently doing, where's it gonna take us? Is it gonna get us closer to the organization or team that we aspire to be? Or are we gonna slowly drift away from that championship standard and team that we know that we ultimately want to get to? Now there's an old Japanese proverb that I've talked about before that the longer you stay on the wrong train, the more expensive the return trip becomes. This is true in leadership too. The longer we wait to address drift, the harder it becomes to correct. This is where one of the most common mistakes that I've seen leaders make and that I hear oftentimes with leaders is they wait to address the drift in the off season. They think, well, it's maybe it's late in the year, they're navigating the ups and downs and the emotional roller coaster of a season, and they just think, well, once we have a clean slate, once we have more time, then we can attend to some of those things. Uh but in reality, sometimes the longer you wait, the more things start to get severed, and the more things get impacted that can be hard to heal and rekindle. So a few years ago, I facilitated uh a leadership workshop with a corporate group. It was a mixed bag of senior leaders as well as some upper level managers. And one of the things that we did is we took each of their organizational values and we asked the really simple question. On a scale of one to five, how well are we currently living this value? Not how important it is, not off, not how often do we talk about it, but are we living it? And then what followed was an open discussion around that. And that conversation surfaced something that was really important because what we noticed is that people had different versions of reality. There were some that had blind spots to certain areas or certain standards where we were falling short, but there were also uh individuals that identified strengths and things that maybe others were kind of overlooking or or neglecting. The value of the exercise wasn't the number, the value was awareness of where is drift emerging in the organization. So I call this the scorecard exercise. And like anything in life, the benefit is that this awareness can help create a choice for us. And that choice is what then can allow us to actually make a significant or more importantly, a sustainable change. So here's your challenge: gather your staff, gather your leadership team, your players, or maybe even your family, and identify the values that matter most. And ask yourself, how well are we living them? Conduct a scorecard audit and ask yourself if we continue down this current path based on these scores, where are we gonna be six months from now? Culture isn't gonna be built by declaring what matters, it's gonna be built by continually checking whether what matters is actually happening and being lived out by everybody. That's the lesson that I took from Tracy Fuchs. Championship cultures aren't created because leaders define their values, they're created because leaders continually return to them. Thanks for listening.