S2 E4 The Culture IS the Training Plan: The human is more important than the winning

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Think about the last time you felt genuinely uncomfortable spending practice time on something that wasn't directly about physical performance. Maybe you ran a team values conversation instead of a physical session. Or maybe you spent 10 minutes at the end of practice checking in with your athletes as people, not just performers. Did a small voice in your head whisper that you should have been doing something that looked a lot more like your sport? Well, today's research is going to reframe what real coaching actually looks like. And it comes courtesy of a group of women who won four Olympic gold medals in 1992 while their rivals were cheating with performance-enhancing drugs. The edge they had wasn't in their training planned, it was in their culture. 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. Today's paper is called The Role of Leadership and Team Culture in Enhancing Sport Performance Outcomes. It was published in the International Journal of Sport and Society in 2021. The lead author, Jennifer Walinga, and her colleagues at Royal Roads University and the University of Victoria went back to one of the most remarkable chapters in Canadian sporting history and asked a question most researchers hadn't thought to ask. Why did this team win? The team was the 1992 Canadian Women's Olympic Rowing Team, and the context matters enormously. This was the tail end of the Eastern Bloc doping era. State-sponsored programs were chemically engineering athletic performance across the former Soviet sphere. Canada's women's rowers had no such shortcut. They had fewer athletes, tighter resources, and one extraordinary thing the researchers spent years trying to name a culture. Here's the big idea, and you can call this one the current effect. Pretty decent for a rowing paper, right? The research found that the most significant factor in this team's success wasn't a training system or a selection method. It was the coach's values. Coach Al Morrow held one foundational belief that sport exists for human and social development. He believed that it was not purely about winning or for medals, it was for people. That belief wasn't just a poster on the locker room wall. It showed up in every structural decision he made, like who got to speak in team meetings, how failure was treated, and whether the lowest ranked athlete's opinion counted in a discussion. It did. One athlete described the effect like this. I had the opportunity to do the right thing every day. It was empowering and inspiring. Another said, the environment was controlled, but I never felt controlled. The coach is the current. Whatever flows through you as a coach is what your athletes feel. That's the finding. And it starts before any part of the sport is completed. Idea two, and you can call this one structure is culture. The coach's values had to travel somewhere. In this case, they traveled through how the team was organized. The research identified five specific practices that created this non-hierarchical environment. Collaboration. Everyone spoke in meetings, including the lowest ranked athlete. Curiosity, a genuine growth mindset baked into daily life. Transparency. Athletes always knew why they were doing what they were doing. Communicated vision. At the start of the four-year Olympic cycle or quad, the whole plan was laid out, and athletes were asked directly, are you in? And finally, community support. Even athletes who didn't make the final roster were treated with genuine dignity and respect. One athlete described the feeling. We knew what the objective was. We knew what we were striving to do in the workout more than just what the workout was. We knew what we were trying to achieve. Here's what that means for us as coaches. The way you organize practice, who you ask for input, and how you share information is itself a cultural statement. Every structure you create tells your athletes what you believe about their capabilities. Idea three, and this one centered on the long game. Call it performance beyond the podium. This non-hierarchical environment didn't just build a winning team. It built whole people prepared for the future. Through the experience, the athletes developed three key competencies. Self-efficacy, the belief that they could do hard things, resilience, not the absence of failure, but the habit of getting back up, and self-awareness, knowing themselves well enough to manage their own performance and emotions. And here's the part that should stop you for a moment. Twenty-six years after Barcelona, these same 11 women won a competitive rowing event together at the head of the Charles Regatta in Boston. All eleven are still engaged in sport in some professional or voluntary capacity. They didn't just win gold, they thrived and built an enduring team culture. The best team culture doesn't just shape one result, it shapes everything that comes after, and that might be the most important thing a coach can build. Now, let's be fair to the full picture. This study has limitations, and the authors are honest about them. This was a single case of one team in one sport in one era. The model they propose is generally compelling, but it hasn't yet been tested across multiple sports or performance levels. We don't know through this research alone how a non-hierarchical approach functions when the coach is new, or the roster is entirely in flux, or the existing sport culture pulls strongly in the opposite direction. It's also worth noting that other research suggests coaching leadership style is not one size fits all. Chella Durai's multidimensional model of leadership argues that effective leadership style depends significantly on athlete characteristics, the demands of the sport, and what athletes actually prefer at a given stage of development. This is a different approach from the pieces we're examining today. So the message here is to examine your values and ask whether your structures are actually reflecting them. This story comes with my coach developer hat on as I was supporting Ariel, not a real name. Ariel had just finished a phone call with a parent 20 minutes before training. It was the kind of call that leaves a residue, the sort where no amount of nodding along actually resolves anything. And the coach arrived at the session carrying it like a backpack, weighing them down. Coaches carry themselves professionally, after all, and there's a long practice habit of walking into the training environment and switching on. We've all done it. But energy doesn't lie, and athletes, particularly the ones who've spent years reading adult faces for cues, felt the current effect pushing them off course mere moments after the first activity started. The warm-up dragged. The session technically happened, the drills ran, but something was muted and the coach felt it too, even if it couldn't be named in the moment. What the coach did was push through on structure alone, sharper instructions, tighter transitions, keeping everything moving so there was no space for the flatness to settle. It was an understandable instinct. But structure without warmth is just management, and these athletes needed more than management that day. What might have been done differently and what came up in the weeks that followed was simply to name it. A brief, honest moment at the start. I'm not quite at my best today, but we're gonna make this good together. What the athletes needed was reassurance that the coach was still present, still with them, and even if running a little low. That kind of transparency tells athletes that self-awareness is something worth practicing, and even the person leading the session is still learning to lead themselves. What struck me most, reflecting with Coach Ariel on this, was the speed at which the insight arrived once there was permission to look honestly. The coach already knew what had happened and knew what the session needed. The question was never about capability. It was about whether the athletes could hold a moment of honesty from their coach without it costing something. They could. They can. And the next time your current runs too fast or threatens to veer your athletes off course, remember that the most powerful thing a coach can do is let the people in their care see them navigate it with grace. Here's how we can apply this. Action one, and this is for you right now. This week, map your current. Before your next session, write down three values you hold as a coach, not aspirational values, the ones you actually hold right now. Then ask yourself honestly, in the last practice, what could an athlete on your team have seen as concrete evidence of each of those values? In how you opened the session, in who got to speak, in how you responded to a mistake. If you can name specific examples, great. If you can't, that's the information. Values that don't show up in your structures are wishes, not culture. Action two, and this is your just in case idea for the longer game. Run a whole person audit of your roster. Think through each athlete on your team. For each person, can you name three things about them beyond their sport or team connection? One interest, one challenge, one aspiration outside of training? If you can't, you have a relationship gap that is also a performance gap. Use your next one-on-one conversation to close it. The 1992 rowers described it clearly. The coach saw them as people first and rowers second, and that influenced everything. That's not soft coaching. It is the foundation. Action three, yes, three today. Try the Are You In conversation with your team. Take one aspect of the season ahead, a training block, a competition cycle, a performance goal, and present the plan to your athletes transparently, including the demands it will make of them. Then ask them directly, what do you think? What could make this work better? You don't need to take every suggestion, but the act of asking is itself a cultural statement about who has a voice on this team. So here's the thing to hold from today. The culture you build is the training plan. The values you carry as a coach, the way you structure your sessions, the questions you ask, and who you ask them to. These are not the soft parts of coaching. They are everything. A group of 11 women proved it in Barcelona in 1992 against teams with pharmaceutical advantages and far greater resources. They won with a culture. I'm Beth Barts, 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 RECERA services. Original music created and recorded by Sean Patterson at Vinyl Safari Studio.