Culture is Rented and Rent Is Due Everyday
On leadership, belonging, accountability, and the work of building something together.
1. Culture is a leadership responsibility, not a leadership possession.
Leaders establish expectations and create the conditions for culture to develop, but they cannot simply declare it into existence. If nobody else can challenge, reinforce, or reinterpret those expectations, you've built compliance, not culture.
2. Culture is negotiated through action.
Every new athlete, every missed lift, every disagreement, every change in circumstance creates an opportunity to reaffirm or revise what the group believes. The values might endure, but their application must be worked out continually.
3. Culture is rooted in contribution, not status.
The national level lifter and the newbie pushing their total, the head coach and the assistant, the D1 one commit star player and the 3rd string all have different responsibilities, but nobody is exempt from contributing.
Look, everything can't be the most important thing.
We live in a horribly fucked-up world that is constantly screaming for our attention. Everything is urgent, everything is novel, and somehow everything is the most important thing happening right now. The loudest, flashiest, most outrageous thing gets our attention, and somebody figures out how to turn that attention into money. Collectively, I don't think this shit is making us happy; I don't think it's making us better informed, more capable, or more connected to the world around us. We're increasingly diverted into some other reality filled with things that have very little to do with our actual lives.
It's stuff. It's noise. Somewhere in all that noise, I think we've lost something pretty fucking important: the belief that we can actually do something together.
For me, the anchor has been sport. Sport is real, visceral, felt; earnest in a way that relatively few things are. There are rules, consequences, and systems for measuring what's going well: your total, points, kilograms, seconds; and what isn't: red lights, missed lifts, penalties, giving the OTHER team points. For all the flaws of sport, and there are plenty, there's a certain immediacy and internal integrity to it that I've always loved. Stimulus = response, mistake = consequences. You work together and you might accomplish something none of you could accomplish alone. I love that shit.
The longer I've coached, the more convinced I've become that the most important part of sport has very little to do with the scoreboard. It's culture. I know, I know. Everybody talks culture, but this isn't a fucking TED Talk or listicle about the five things that every great team needs, or even Bill Walsh—though his book is good, and you should read it.
Culture Isn't Something You Have
I used to think about culture as something you built. Establish the expectations, communicate the standards, reinforce the behaviors, and eventually, if you did your job well enough, you'd have a strong culture. I still believe in all those things, but I've come to think that culture isn't really something you build and then possess; it's something you have to keep making, together, every day.
Leadership has a responsibility to establish direction, communicate what matters, define expectations, and make decisions, but leadership cannot demand culture into existence. Culture happens when the people within a group take those expectations and begin applying them autonomously; when they challenge each other, when they challenge you, when they challenge themselves, and when they encounter something new and collectively decide what their values require of them.
It can't live on a wall or in a handbook. Those things can describe what you hope your culture will be, but they can't make it real.
Culture has to be negotiated, daily, anew, and through action.
Pass It Out
It's Thursday at The Resilient Strength. Thursday is our barbell party; powerlifters are getting after it (I think it was 2RM squats that night), weightlifters are getting close to competition, and the weights are getting serious. People are making lifts, missing lifts, getting frustrated, getting excited. It's normal training, nothing bad and nothing particularly remarkable either.
Then somebody hit a PR, and the captain of the youth weightlifting team says: "Coach, we're not passing it out, "Coach, we're not passing it out." He was right.
Passing it out is something we carried into The Resilient Strength from my years coaching football at Serra, which I think we stole from the Golden State Warriors (great cultures learn from others). When somebody does something worth celebrating for them, we stop what we're doing and recognize it together. It's simple, loud, a little goofy at first, and we'd stopped doing it.
Not intentionally. Nobody decided that celebrating each other wasn't important anymore; we were just busy. Training was happening, new athletes had joined, and the room had changed. Somewhere along the way, something that mattered had slipped.
What struck me wasn't that we'd forgotten, but who remembered. A young athlete recognized that something was missing from our culture and felt comfortable enough to tell the coach.
So we stopped, explained passing it out to the new lifters, and celebrated the PR. Then somebody made a lift they'd just missed. Pass it out. Somebody else hit a PR. Pass it out. Suddenly the room changed; people were laughing, cheering, taking risks, and celebrating people they might not have known particularly well an hour earlier.
The weights hadn't changed, the programming hadn't changed, and the athletes hadn't changed, but the way they understood what they were doing together had.
And the most important coaching that happened that afternoon wasn't done by me.
It's the Do, Not the Who
I’ve been fortunate in my career to learn from great coaches at my stop along the way to Resilient Strength; Junipero Serra, Sacred Heart Cathedral, the Granada Lions, wherever. When our culture was really good, anybody could hold anybody accountable. We'd run liners, and if somebody missed a line, they got called out. It didn't matter whether you were a first-string player with a Division I offer or a third-string kid trying to earn a spot on special teams; you missed the line, and everybody knew the expectation.
The same applied to coaches. If a coach wasn't ready for his drill period, they could be called out too, because that's their job and they have people depending on them.
What made that powerful wasn't the consequences or the fact that we were especially good at running liners; it was that everybody understood that the work belonged to everybody.
One of the wisest things I've heard about coaching came from Ken Peralta: "It's the do, not the who."
I've carried that with me ever since, because strong culture isn't rooted in power or personality. It's rooted in action. Everybody is welcome, everybody is expected to work, and while that doesn't mean everybody has the same responsibilities, it does mean nobody gets to be above the work or beneath contributing to it.
Accountability Isn't a Police State
Now, here's where this gets complicated. If everybody is responsible for upholding the culture, what happens when somebody gets it wrong? What happens when an athlete calls somebody out unfairly, when somebody misunderstands an expectation, or when two people see the same situation differently?
Because if culture just means everybody walking around enforcing rules on everybody else, congratulations, you've built a fucking police state.
That's not what I'm talking about.
Accountability isn't supposed to be punitive; it's an invitation to collaborate. If somebody calls you out for missing a line, maybe your response is, "I'll hit them all. Watch me on the next one." or "hey, we're not done yet, let's go hit these successories." Great, let's do it. If a coach isn't ready for a session, maybe there's something going on in their life, maybe they're overwhelmed, or maybe they need somebody to help get the equipment ready so they can be where they're supposed to be.
The point isn't to catch somebody doing something wrong; the point is to make sure the work gets done.
If we're acting with integrity, there's nothing particularly threatening about somebody questioning what we're doing. We can explain ourselves, listen, ask somebody else to help us work through a disagreement, and sometimes recognize that we were wrong. The same expectation will inevitably look different to different people in different circumstances, which is why communication is so fundamental.
Culture doesn't eliminate those differences; it gives us a way to work through them. This is how we build safe spaces where there is purpose driven and values upheld. As Simon Sinek reminds us, “Culture is not what you say, it’s what you tolerate.” So we promote and constantly refine out values in action. As we talk about community and safe spaces, remember that Argentina was a safe community for the Nazis. When you're considering what sort of safe space to create, remember who and what you're making it for and that safety doesn't mean everybody no matter what they do.
Everybody Is Welcome. Not Everything Is.
We've had two experiences at in coaching that clarified this for me, both involving coaches whose actions weren't meeting the expectations we'd established for our community.
In the first, there were communal concerns about this coach’s participation in our shared culture and we asked what was going on. Rather than engaging with the concerns, they insisted their own interpretation of our expectations was sufficient and that individuality meant they should be free to participate however they wanted. We talked, disagreed, and kept trying to find common ground, but ultimately couldn't. We asked them to leave. I wish we hadn’t had to and the take away is definitely that communication is essential if there’s going to be course correction culturally.
I don't love that outcome, and there's nothing particularly satisfying about it, but being part of something means accepting that other people have legitimate expectations of you. Diversity doesn't mean you get to opt out of your responsibilities to others.
In another situation, with a Resilient coach and different concerns, different cultural expectations, we had a similar conversation. This time the response was essentially, "You're right. I've been dealing with some things, and I haven't been doing my part. How can I fix it?" We talked through expectations, what support they needed, and what they could do differently. They took ownership, made changes, and became an even better coach.
The difference wasn't that one person made mistakes and the other didn't. Both had fallen short of expectations, as all of us inevitably will. The difference was whether they were willing to participate in the process of making things better.
That's why culture has to be something you opt into. Not because everyone must agree on everything, but because belonging requires a willingness to do the work together.
Why This Matters Beyond the Gym
These might seem like small things. A kid reminding us to celebrate a PR, an athlete holding a teammate accountable, a difficult conversation with a coach. But I think these moments matter precisely because they're small. They're opportunities to practice something that seems increasingly absent from the world around us: the ability to work through problems together, with some shared understanding of what we're actually trying to accomplish.
I think we're experiencing a crisis of leadership, belonging, and collective efficacy. A non-exhaustive list of fucked up things: climate change, loneliness, economic insecurity, and the increasingly absurd extraction of every resource we can find, whether it's the last drop of oil beneath the earth or lithium from the strange, alien inner space we call the sea.
How do we convince people to take what they need instead of everything they can? How do we organize ourselves around problems whose solutions demand sacrifice, cooperation, and patience?
I don't know, but I do believe that solving problems like these requires something we've become remarkably bad at cultivating: a coherent culture that allows people to produce coherent responses to common problems.
A shared understanding of what matters, a belief that our actions have consequences, a willingness to hold ourselves and one another accountable, and perhaps most importantly, a sense that we belong to something in which our contributions matter.
The Algebra of Culture
This is what I keep coming back to. Culture is the unification of disparate parts: different people, experiences, abilities, and responsibilities becoming capable, through shared work, of something none of us could accomplish independently. That's the algebra of it.
Not everybody becoming the same person or agreeing about everything, but everybody understanding how their contribution fits into something larger. Leadership sets the direction, communicates the expectations, and makes sure people have what they need to contribute; then it has to make room for the group to take ownership, to challenge, correct, celebrate, and adapt.
If the only person who can enforce the culture is the person in charge, it isn't much of a culture. It's a set of instructions, and instructions stop working when nobody's there to give them.
Culture is what happens when the group knows what to do next, not because somebody told them, but because they've learned, together, what matters.
I think that's one of the most valuable things we get to practice through sport. The goal is often big, the steps are many, and the path isn't always clear, but we can build a process for responding to problems together. We can learn to confront mistakes without abandoning one another, celebrate success without making it about one person, and disagree without treating disagreement as betrayal.
We can build places where people feel they belong and believe they can make a difference, and I think those two things—belonging and efficacy—are in desperately short supply right now. Not just for young athletes, but for all of us.
The points don't matter much in the grand scheme of things. Neither does the lift. What we learn while pursuing them might, because the game ends, the season ends, the scoreboard gets turned off, and what remains is what we've learned about how to live and work with other people.
That's culture, and that's why it comes first.
