If You Don’t Teach Culture, You Don’t Teach Anything

Read on my website / Read time: 4 minutes

Development hinges on iterations; without continuous iteration, you won't progress toward your full potential. Period.

This is foundational and self-evident.

Yet our coaching education platforms DO NOT teach it (or even reference it), and our leaders in the sport don’t speak about it. You have to go outside the sport or outside the country to even hear it referenced. “The Patriot Way” or All Blacks rugby team equivalent does not exist within our soccer culture.

Developing a culture and/or personal development is not a 1.5-hour lecture from a sports psychologist during your B-license course.

Culture is the platform for which everything else is built.

Here are my 7 best explanations for why creating and teaching culture is not a focal point of coaching education platforms and the soccer culture.

1. It’s Complex to Teach

Where do you even start as a novice coach?

There are books that provide case studies of great cultures, but zero materials on how to actually create and teach culture. 99% of the environments around you don’t get it, so how do you learn? Find the 1% that do it and learn from them.

Teaching how to create and cultivate a strong culture is one major way The Developer’s Way will separate from its coaching education contemporaries.

2. Requires Artistry

To teach culture requires artistry, and that’s not what our coaching education platforms teach.

They want you to copy and paste a methodology that they adopted from another federation and don’t really understand themselves. Coaching education’s purpose should be to support the development of your ideas and artistry—not define its parameters for the sake of a piece of paper with a letter on it.

Building and teaching culture is an artistic endeavor that requires a different way of teaching that our coaching education platforms have not yet shown consistently they are capable of.

3. It’s the Longer Road

It’s simply more difficult to build and maintain a culture than shifting responsibility onto others.

There are culture reps everywhere, and this requires a lot of energy, especially when the endeavor doesn’t promise glory. Culture is not a short-term fix.

Culture is not slapping some values on a locker room wall—it’s an everyday thing that requires service and humility above all things.

4. Perception is Prioritized Over Development

Development and building culture is not always pretty on the eyes.

Ego-driven leaders want instant validation that their product is good. And when it is not, they have to change the optics, which many times means recruiting “better” players in to overcome the poor culture and vision being provided.

Prioritizing culture, especially during the tough moments, prioritizes development over optics.

5. Leaders are Prioritized Over Players

Prioritizing the development of a strong culture shifts the responsibility off of the player and onto leadership.

And let’s be honest, our soccer culture is rife with leaders who are loaded at the hip with excuses for why it’s not their fault. And implicitly, we sign off on this exchange in our soccer culture putting the needs of any player (the can’t-miss prospect, the late developer, or the kid with a few qualities who needs the right environment) below the ego of its leaders.

Doesn’t matter if you quit at age 10 or have a 10-year MLS career, all players eventually lose within our soccer culture because they end up in an environment where their development was never the priority.

6. It Requires Humility at the Expense of Ego

Humility, empathy, and service are the three core attributes of the Developer.

They serve a vision, a team, and its people in that order, and what's best for them never enters the equation. To be a servant leader requires that you are not free of ego, but simply aware of it, so you can continue serving your team and their best interest.

You are playing the more impactful game of development, so you know above all things, you must teach players how to continue growing, learning and developing both on a soccer field and off of it.

7. It Redefines What Winning is

You win by getting your players closer to their potential.

The small wins are everywhere, and these types of wins remind us of the greater truth that we are the outcome, and not any external result outside of our control. The irony is that the long road of teaching culture and focusing on development creates the conditions for winning in its more traditional sense.

Teaching culture is the ultimate win-win scenario.

Final Words

Your current knowledge matters less than your team’s ability to continuously iterate.

I’ll say it again:?

Your current knowledge matters less than your team’s ability to continuously iterate.

Because development, learning, or any infinite game does not have an endpoint. You “win” by staying in the game. You win by continuing to meet all challenges head-on, solve them, and move into new space on the other side.

There are no perfect visions and there are no perfect outcomes.

But our soccer culture’s nature is to take shortcuts to ensure we feel like we are closer to those things. This is why there is such a proliferation of Non-Developers within the soccer culture. It’s like everyone is playing a short-term status game instead of playing the infinitely better game of development, where “success” of all sorts is its natural byproduct.

The next generation of great coaches will separate from their contemporaries because they understand this fundamental truth:

If you don’t teach culture, you don’t teach anything.

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Are you a Developer? Take my FREE course, Culture Creation Mastery, and learn how to transform your environment in just 5 days with daily lessons delivered to your inbox. This is the ONLY coaching course that teaches you how to create and build a culture that ensures long-term success.