A Curiosities series · Leadership & Culture
How do sports organizations build and sustain a high-performance culture?
Six questions about how organizations handle truth, pressure, people and continuity.
6 articles available
Start with Part 1Everyone credits culture and almost nobody can define it. It is not the feeling in the room — it is the rules nobody wrote down, running whether or not you designed them.
The player who saw the answer coming said nothing, and the arithmetic that kept her quiet was correct. Safety is not comfort; it is what makes a hard standard survivable.
An open door changes nothing in a room that has already learned to stay silent. Repairing a culture means treating the soil, not replacing the person standing in it.
Pressure does not stop at the players. It reaches the person calling the timeout, and what survives is the decision you made in advance about how you would decide.
A nineteen-year-old holds up the jersey, and six weeks later he is alone in a city where he knows nobody. High performance runs on people it can also use up.
You do not control the storm; you build for weather. The real test of a culture is what is still standing after the person who built it leaves.
Test how an organization would handle a fictional concern
Leaders and teams checking whether a concern could actually travel — no real case details · About 10–15 minutes
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Get access by email: Plan how your team handles a concern →From The Psychology of High-Performance Sports Organizations, by Dr. Marie Claire Bourque and Madeline Antony.