Ep 363 | How to Create a Culture of Winning

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Today I want to talk about team and business culture. I don't know what it is, it's probably the old Razz going for me, but as of late I've been in a number of rooms where we've talked about business culture, team culture. How do I improve my team's culture? And I think this culture term is a really interesting one because I don't know if we necessarily all define it the same way. See, we know that a company's culture can have a powerful impact on its performance. We believe the culture is the glue that binds an organization together. And it's really, if done properly, the hardest thing for your competitors in your business, in your industry to copy. So, it can be a competitive advantage. But culture doesn't always produce great results. Just because you have a strong culture may not always produce great results. Research will show that. Why is there though a disconnect? Why is there a disconnect between a strong culture and results sometimes. The reason I believe this to be the case is that in my experience, too many companies, too many teams think of culture as a way to make people feel good about where they work. And it's not necessarily as a way to help your team members or help your employees and help the organization as a whole perform better. Let me say that again. I think too many cultures are constructed in such a manner that the objective is to make people feel good about where they work. And it's not done from the perspective of, I'm going to improve culture, we're gonna improve culture to help our employees, help our team members and the organization as a whole perform even better. High-performing companies think about culture differently than those that don't succeed. They know that winning cultures aren't just about affiliation with that company. They're about results. They're about results. And so these conversations have been coming up in rooms recently, and I've been thinking around what is a culture of winning? What is a culture of winning? Because at the end of the day, You're likely building an organization because you want to win. Maybe winning is based around profitability of that company. Maybe it's based around impact. Whatever it is based around, you want to win. That's why you're building something. So what's a culture of winning? What's that even look like? What does that even mean? I think a culture of winning is a culture that sets the groundwork for success. I think culture in general, especially winning culture, includes beliefs and ideas and values and rules, codes of conduct in, in a team, in an organization. It shapes how people within the culture are going to think and how they feel and how they act. A culture that celebrates virtue, for example, is one that's going to inspire people to be virtuous. A winning culture, then, is a culture that sets the stage for positive attitudes and high expectations and successful performances, unapologetically so. Winning teams want to win. Winning cultures want to win. They prize winning. They want to— they strive for victory. And they give it their all to win the game, the sport that they're in fact playing. So how do you go about creating a winning culture, right? What, what should you be thinking around? I think these are things we all know, but I'm just gonna point them out. If you wanna create a culture of winning, you've gotta have an emphasis on standards, high standards, high expectations, individually and collectively as a group. So number 1, we've gotta have high standards. Number 2, We've got to celebrate failure, meaning that we're resilient. We've got to overcome things and we have to persist in the face of challenges. Next, winning cultures, those cultures of winning, they're collaborative. It's a collective effort, teamwork in other words. Number 4 on my list, cultures of winning, Like a winning culture has recognition. In other words, we acknowledge success, big and small. We recognize and celebrate it. We reinforce positive behaviors and we motivate continued effort. This is where results start to show up, which leads to number 5, which is accountability. There's a clear sense in winning cultures of responsibility for results. Results matter. Every team member understands their role and how they contribute to the team's success. Number 6, I would say continuous improvement. Kind of goes back to, you know, resilience, what I said just a bit ago, but this focus on learning and adapting and striving to be better over time. In other words, winning cultures never, ever, ever settle for mediocrity. And then lastly, a culture of winning, number 7, has a positive attitude. There's a belief in the possibility of success. We're optimistic. We're proactive in our approach to challenges. Now, I love to use sports as, as an analogy for a lot of things. And I think we can look at organizations that have what we would say is a culture of winning and maybe look at those that don't. And I think there's some very, very stark, very clear differences. I am not tied to any of these teams. I wish I was because the team I'm tied to, at least in football, is the opposite of what I'm about to describe. But let's talk about— let's start with the New York Yankees. Love them or hate them, the Yankees are synonymous with winning. This team has, I don't know, 27 or so World Series titles. The most in Major League Baseball, their culture is built on high expectations. It's built on a commitment to excellence. And a lot of that just has to do with the legacy of legendary players that they've had. Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Derek Jeter. No matter how the Yankees perform each and every year, at the start of the next season, everybody on that team and every fan and everybody in the nation for that matter thinks the Yankees are going to win. Why is that? It's because they have a culture of winning, much like the Los Angeles Lakers. Love them or hate them, the Lakers are a storied franchise. They have a history of success, 17 NBA championships. They've cultivated a winning culture through strong leadership, and then, like the Yankees, have some iconic players in Magic Johnson and, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Kobe Bryant. Relentlessly pursuing excellence. No matter how the Lakers perform each and every year, there is an expectation that this team is going to win. There are lots of other teams like this. Manchester United in, in the Premier League. I think the Golden State Warriors are now being perceived as an organization that has this winning culture. I think you've got other sports, even my Phoenix Suns who have not won a title, but the bar is always high. That organization has a high standard. But we can learn maybe just as much, if not more, from those organizations that have the opposite of a winning culture. The Cleveland Browns, I'm sorry to my Browns fans out there. They seem to be, they always seem to be turning it around, but it hasn't happened yet. They have a long history of struggles. Their team even relocated to Baltimore, you know, and the team became the Baltimore Ravens. And then they went through a bunch of head coaches and quarterbacks and front office changes. And then they brought the Browns back to Cleveland. You know, from 1999 to 2020, the Browns only had 3 winning seasons. How about the New York Jets? God, I wanna root for the Jets, but they are inconsistent. They had a Super Bowl win. It was in 1969. They've been plagued with poor draft decisions, frequent coaching changes, underperforming teams. We're pulling for them. It's just not happening. How about the Arizona Coyotes who are no longer even here in Arizona? You know, I'm in Arizona. That's why I talk about them. The team had so many challenges and financial instability and ownership changes They can never become competitive. They've struggled forever. No attendance. And then ultimately all the relocation threats became realistic when, you know, came to fruition when they, they just recently moved to Utah. So why did these teams struggle? Why, why do they have the opposite of a winning culture? You know, and I love to look at inversion and say, okay, what didn't these teams have? Well, these teams did not have leadership. As a matter of fact, they're the opposite of that. Leadership instability. Constant changes in their front office management, constant changes in ownership, changes in coaching staff. There was no team chemistry. In addition, they've drafted poorly. They've drafted players poorly. They've underdeveloped players. They made poor draft choices and they failed to develop talent. And as a result, they never had— these teams don't have competitive rosters. They had a lack of vision, in my opinion. There was no clear cohesive strategy, and the team therefore in the front office never aligned their efforts. And then lastly, all these things, you know, packaged together creates all sorts of cultural issues. No prioritization of accountability or of excellence, of resilience. Again, the opposite of what you'd see out of the Lakers or the Yankees, or how about the Green Bay Packers? Who have a legacy of success and an era like the Vince Lombardi era. I mean, gosh, no matter what, you go in every season, you think the Packers are going to win. The community literally owns the team. It's publicly owned. They're consistent, they're stable, they've got tradition and a commitment to excellence. So where am I going with all this? We talk so much about culture, but at the end of the day, Doesn't culture oftentimes, you know, isn't it easy to— I shouldn't say easy, it's difficult to turn it, to change it. But if you win and you win consistently over time and you have some key players that build legacy and you have solid coaching and you build this commitment to excellence and this tradition, I mean, no matter how your team performs, everyone still shows up the next day saying, "We've got a chance." So winning almost always solves things. Now, of course, it's hard to go out and win, but the idea that we've got to create all these amazing things for people to keep them, you know, to keep them within our company, to retain them, yeah, that's nice to think around, but you know what fixes all that? Winning. and in business that's making people more money, that's impacting more lives, that's impacting more customers. So the focusing question for you today, as I've run through what a winning culture entails, what do you have right now in your world that you could double down on that makes you an even more, you know, stronger culture? And what areas of opportunity exist? Where are we possibly missing the mark and we have some opportunity for improvement? That's all I have for you today, the No Days Off Podcast. Thank you so much for listening, and remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get better.