Trusting the process is more nuanced than it would appear on the surface.
“Culture” is a funny concept. We’ve all likely been part of good cultures before. A nuclear family, a working team, a sport team… wherever there is a group, there’s an opportunity for a good culture.
There’s also an opportunity for a bad culture. But as much as we acknowledge its existence as a concept because we have experienced it, culture remains simultaneously hard to define and yet also ubiquitously discussed in the sports world.
In the offseason, every new NFL head coach brings with him stories from the players about how “this year is different” and the team’s culture has been overhauled. I’m not proposing the idea that everyone professing such a phenomenon is lying; only that for as much as we discuss the ideas of “good culture” and “bad culture,” we don’t seem to be able to construct an effable statement on what makes culture good, despite coaches doing their best to explain it in press conferences over and over again.
Perhaps, like “obscenity” in the landmark Jacobellis v. Ohio United States Supreme Court case, “culture” is something that we could never attempt further to define, but we know it when we see it. Or maybe we can do a better job defining it.
Buffalo Bills head coach Sean McDermott made a statement that resonated throughout the sports commentary landscape after four regular-season games in 2018. The Bills were 1-3 and rookie quarterback Josh Allen was getting his feet wet in the NFL as a raw prospect who looked exactly that. McDermott issued the following quote:
“The culture to me trumps strategy. That’s what I believe in whole heartedly. It doesn’t mean we have choir boys, it means we have guys that love football and do things the right way for the most part. I understand that. We’re trying to build something that does take time, but overall, guys have to be committed to the process.
That means staying mentally tough in moments like this where we start a season 1-3 and it hasn’t always been easy. I’ve been through this before, I can tell them that. Those of us that have been around this league long enough have been through it before. If you do things the right way and continue to do things the right way, the long-term success when you make the right decisions, those things will take care of themselves.”
“Culture trumps strategy” was a hotly debated topic and the sound bite du jour after that press conference, but it’s McDermott’s clear attempt to define culture that likely carried more weight. He rejected the idea that morality is the fundamental building block of culture by overtly saying the team wasn’t looking for “choir boys,” but specifically called out players who “love football” and “do things the right way.”
Figuring out how loving football works to improve the culture of a football team seems easy enough. But what is “the right way” to do things? The vagueness of that term leaves room for a number of different definitions and explanations.
I have a theory I’ll attempt to explain here that I believe can help determine what “the right way” to do things is. At the risk of being completely cheesy, it lines up with the quote from Peter Gibbons in the classic workplace comedy “Office Space” — it’s about motivation.
Peter was having a conversation with workplace consultants when he described his own lack of motivation, saying that if he works his (expletive) off and his employer “ships a few extra units, (he) doesn’t see another dime.” He goes on to explain that his only real motivation is to not be hassled by the eight different bosses he has alongside the fear of losing his job.
This is the crux of the issue. “The right way” immediately leads us to believe that the answer is a “how” interrogative. The method by which an action is taken will become our focus as we search for the answer of what “the right way” actually is. But I would argue that it’s not about the “how.” It’s about the “why.”
Motivation is not a simple concept. There are a multitude of reasons why people do anything. People get up in the morning and go to work because they want to receive the money the get in exchange for their labor, for certain. In fact, that’s likely the majority of the reasoning for many people.
But people also may want to interact with their coworkers and/or might enjoy the mental engagement they experience while working. In addition to this, they might be ambitious individuals who see their current work as a bridge to future opportunities, whether through a promotion at their current job or some other path to what they believe is a better life.
These motivating factors are not exclusionary. You don’t just have one of them and not any of the others. There are a significant number of them (only a few potential ones noted above) and each of them could have a percentage assigned to them from 0% on up, but it’s highlight unlikely that one of them is 100% and all the others are blank.
But essentially all motivating factors can be put into one of two buckets:
- The “so I (future)” bucket
- The “because I (past/present)” bucket
Lumping each factor into its appropriate bucket is as simple as placing it into narrative conversational form.
“Why did you go to work today?”
“So I can get paid.”
(I recognize that you can be tricky and convert the response to “because I want to get paid,” but if we try to get response in its shortest form, it’ll help bucket them appropriately.)
The future-facing statement about doing an action so that a future desired outcome is achieved falls into the “so I (future)” bucket. Whereas a present or past referencing statement like “I went to work today because I love my job” falls into the “because I (past/present)” bucket.
‘Everyone has myriad motivations and it’s not as simple as one or the other as mentioned above. Solving for culture as Sean McDermott mentioned above by finding guys who do things “the right way” can be explained by finding out where the majority of a player’s motivation resides.
Why do they play football?
“I show up to work because I love football.”
“I show up to work so I can make the Hall of Fame.”
“I show up to work so I can make a lot of money.”
“I show up to work so I can be a celebrity.”
“I show up to work because I promised my mom I would.”
“I show up to work because that’s the kind of person I am.”
Most of these motivational factors will exist simultaneously in the minds of each of the NFL players the Bills, and every other team, will have on their roster in perpetuity. But which ones carry the most weight?
Each of the above motivating factors could be assigned a weight and placed in one of the “so I (future)” buckets and “because I (past/present)” buckets. When we completed that exercise for each player, which bucket would carry more weight? When rolled up to the aggregated whole, if your team is 80/20 slanted in favor of “so I (future),” you likely have a bunch of individuals acting out of their own self interest.
While follower’s of economist Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” theory might very much enjoy the idea that each person pursuing their own self-interest could lead to a better whole, we’ve seen in practice how that phenomenon, when unchecked and unbalanced can impact team culture. NFL players, when asked about problematic team cultures in the past, have consistently referenced putting the team above a players own self-interest as being a key component of improving and maintaining the environment.
But how does that improvement happen?
Apart from the obvious subtraction of players whose motivation weighs heavily in favor of “so I (future)” in favor of players whose motivation weighs heavily in favor of “because I (past),” one of the ways you can help shift and modify team culture is by making your team’s motivations transparent.
The Bills are notorious for having their players get up and speak in front of the team about what football means to them during offseason practices. They get to tell their life story and talk about why they believe they’re here. That vulnerability naturally forces everyone else in that room to examine their own motivations and potentially identify weights that might be skewed heavily to an undesirable side.
We’ve heard this referred to before as the balance of “loving football” versus “loving what football can do for them.” If you’re someone with even an ounce of introspection, listening to someone tell their story that reveals their motivations as being tethered primarily to the “because I (past/present)” bucket might help you find your own way to that majority weighting.
And so the team keeps examining free agents and draft prospects they believe bring that appropriate majority weighting to the organization, and then they allow that to refresh and cross-pollinate across the team. In doing so, they hope to maintain a group of individuals who, while still partially motivated by non-team-centric items, will consistently do thing “the right way.”
…and that’s the way the cookie crumbles. I’m Bruce Nolan with Buffalo Rumblings. You can find me on Twitter and Instagram @BruceExclusive and look for new episodes of “The Bruce Exclusive” every Thursday on the Rumblings Cast Network — see more in my LinkTree!