Success teams argue about talent vs. culture all the time, which one actually wins when the pressure is on? In many organizations the answer is simple: leaders like Mike Golub know talent gets you starts, but culture wins the season, and that distinction becomes the cornerstone of how teams are built.
Culture isn’t a poster on the wall or a one-off retreat; it’s the regular, repeatable playbook for how people treat one another, solve problems, and show up every morning. This post walks through how lessons from locker-room leadership translate to the boardroom, with practical plays any manager, new or seasoned, can run to build a resilient, high-performing culture.
Why culture beats talent (most of the time)
Talent is fragile. A superstar might carry a team for a quarter, a season, even a year, but without trust, clear norms, and shared goals, that same talent will fracture under stress. Culture, by contrast, is resilient because it’s embedded in everyday behavior: how conflicts are handled, how feedback travels, and whether people place team goals above individual highlight reels.
Think of culture like a team’s conditioning program. Everyone can attend practice, but only those who adopt the team’s habits, punctuality, preparation, mutual accountability, truly improve. When the heat is on, culture sets default responses. Teams with strong culture don’t need precise instructions for every scenario; they already know what good looks like.
Translating locker-room lessons into business plays
Locker rooms teach three things that matter in any organization: clarity of roles, rituals that bond people, and tough-but-fair accountability. Here’s how to turn each one into a business move.
- Make roles clear like a playbook. When everyone knows what they have to do and what will happen if they don’t, teams do their finest work. That means that job descriptions aren’t legal papers; they are the basis for what is expected of you every day. As the team grows or changes direction, make sure to regularly review and change positions.
- Rituals help people feel like they belong. Pre-game routines, shared chants, or simple post-practice debriefs create identity. In the workplace, rituals can be stand-up meetings, a predictable feedback cadence, or celebration rituals after milestones. Consistency matters more than flashiness.
- Make accountability a skill, not a weapon. Good coaches correct players publicly when appropriate and coach privately when necessary. Managers should be equally intentional: praise in the open, coach in private, and always tie accountability back to team goals.
Three plays you can run this week
You don’t need a budget or a consulting firm to start shifting culture. Here are three practical plays:
- Play 1, The One-Question Daily Standup: Ask everyone, “What’s the one thing I must do today to help the team?” Keep it short, make it habitual, and watch priorities align.
- Play 2, Failure Postmortems with Respect: After setbacks, run a 20-minute, blame-free debrief that asks what happened, what we learned, and what we’ll change. Publish the outcomes so lessons become shared assets.
- Play 3, The Two-Minute Thank You: Encourage teammates to send two-minute notes of appreciation, either in chat or during weekly meetings. Gratitude is a small investment with huge cultural returns.
Hiring and onboarding: your first practice matters
You can always fire someone later, but hiring is the first, and often most lasting, cultural decision. Recruit for values and behaviors as much as for skills. During interviews, probe for examples that reveal how candidates behave under stress and how they work with teammates.
Onboarding isn’t paperwork, it’s socialization. Pair new hires with mentors, set a 30/60/90 plan focused on contribution and relationships, and make a habit of checking in on how they’re learning the team’s norms. The faster someone internalizes “how things are done here,” the faster they become a true contributor.
Everyday rituals that stick, small moves, big effects
Rituals don’t need to be elaborate. The most powerful ones are simple and repeatable:
- Start meetings with one quick win: it sets a positive tone and reinforces progress.
- End with a single action item: reduce ambiguity and improve follow-through.
- Use consistent language for core values so they’re memorable and actionable.
Rituals remind people what matters without a memo. When rituals align with values, they become the glue that holds teams together when priorities shift.
Measuring culture the right way
Culture feels squishy, but you can measure signals that indicate cultural health. Look beyond pulse surveys and monitor leading indicators: meeting effectiveness, voluntary turnover in key teams, frequency of cross-team collaboration, and the speed of decision-making. Qualitative input, stories from exit interviews or newly hired employees, often reveals more than quarterly scores.
Importantly, don’t weaponize metrics. Use them to surface real conversations, then follow up with concrete experiments to see what changes behavior. Culture changes with time, not by law.
Leadership: showing > telling
The quickest way to eliminate culture is to make it a rule from the top without showing people how to do it. Leaders set the tone by doing modest, obvious things like being on time, giving credit, being open to feedback, and putting the health of the team first. When leaders act in the way they want others to, permission structures change and individuals feel more at ease trying new things.
Another thing a leader should do is name the trade-offs. To do well, you may have to put up with short-term discomfort, longer hours, tighter deadlines, and honest comments. Leaders should be clear about the reasons, the timing, and the help that is available. People are more likely to buy in when they know what the goal is and see leaders sharing the load.
The culture maintenance plan for building longevity
A culture that lasts is one that is kept up. Schedule quarterly culture check-ins, rotate ownership of rituals so they don’t become stale, and create a simple repository of “ways we do things”, a living guide for both new hires and long-tenured staff. Treat culture like product work: iterate, measure, and prioritize improvements.
Also, be ready for change. Teams get bigger, industries change, and what worked last year might not work with today’s plan. Cultures that are healthy are flexible: they keep their underlying beliefs but change how they do things to fit new situations.
Conclusion: Play together to win
Talent gets you in the news; culture gets you to the top. You can make a team that always does well, even when things are tough, by treating culture like a live playbook that makes responsibilities clear, builds routines, holds people accountable for their goodness, and measures what counts. Pick one ritual, one role to improve, and one honest talk to have. Those little plays add up quickly. In the end, the companies that stay the longest aren’t the ones with a lot of stars on their team. They’re the ones with a culture that makes everyone better than they would be alone.