Nate Baker's Newsletter #95

"The coaching education newsletter for those dedicated to helping their people pursue their potential."

The Culture Rep

Essential Reading for All Developers

The Bad Culture Playbook: Create a Toxic Culture in 7 Steps

November 15, 2024 | Read on my website | Read time: 5 minutes

An outsider can often sense a toxic culture the moment they step into the environment.

There are objective signs, but there’s also an intuitive feel.

We’ve all been there. All of us have had the experience of walking into a new environment and sensing something was off.

That something wasn’t right.

The same holds true for exceptional environments. You may not know every detail of the vision, but you can certainly feel it. There’s an energy to it.

As I observe our soccer culture—and society as a whole—it seems clear that many people want sustained success…

Without the work it requires.

Why is this the case?

It’s a spectrum that runs from uninformed optimism all the way to delusion.

Creating a strong culture is the platform on which sustained success is built. It isn’t discussed and rarely taught (the one exception).

But sometimes the best way to teach something is to show exactly how not to do it.

Using inverted thinking, here are the 7 steps to create a toxic culture.

1. Don’t Establish a Primary Leader

Make it very unclear who is actually driving the vision forward.

This isn’t about who has the most power. It’s about who has been empowered and trusted to lead the group and is fully supported in that role.

We all know several professional teams where the head coach is undercut by upper management instead of being empowered to do the job.

There isn’t a clear delineation of roles. There are no shared goals or motivations. It’s a power game that creates constant drama, harming both the environment and its people.

If it’s unclear who your leader is, your players will be less incentivized to follow.

2. Make Your Vision to Win at All Costs

Have a vision driven by something you do not completely control.

And make it short-term. This creates a way of working that resembles the “whack-a-mole” arcade game, where you’re just trying to solve for uncertainty. Everything becomes a reactive response instead of a decision based on a longer-term vision.

When your process is “whack-a-mole,” every day is groundhog day.

No real sustainable long-term growth can be achieved. If an organization gets caught playing the wrong game, it will affect the motivations and emotions of everyone in the building.

Without a greater vision guiding your process, you’ll find yourself holding a mallet, wondering how you ended up playing the wrong game.

3. Give Players the Majority Stake

“It’s about players!”

I worked briefly with a coach who would scream this when things didn’t go well. His vision was to have players compensate for his lack of one. This approach is the opposite of leadership.

The coach should always hold the majority stake in the vision.

Asking players to figure it out themselves for your sake isn’t just a slippery slope to talent accumulation. It’s a slippery slope to viewing players as slabs of meat that have an expiration date.

A surefire way to create a toxic culture is to build a team around the leader’s ego.

4. Don’t Collaborate

Just live on personal islands of self-interest.

Development requires a leader to convince their people to follow them on a journey toward a potential that is undefinable, unpromised, and difficult to reach. That’s a tough gig. It becomes impossible when ego is the main driver.

Self-preservation is the opposite of collaboration.

It’s no longer about the team—it’s about the individual. High performance is impossible without true collaboration. But collaboration is impossible when self-interest is of a higher value than what is best for the team.

You can’t sustain success if everyone is moving in different directions.

5. Be a Black Hole (Not a Lighthouse)

Be an energy sapper instead of an energy giver.

When anything enters your atmosphere, make it about you. Don’t celebrate the growth of your players after a win; celebrate yourself. Don’t meet your player’s vulnerability after a loss; crush it to make yourself feel better.

Repeat this enough, and you can guarantee your culture will become toxic.

This clearly defines the difference between the non-developer and the Developer. The non-developer will continue to make it about themselves, which sucks the energy out of the building. You can sense the lack of joy within these environments the moment you step inside.

The Developer, however, serves with humility and continues to light the path.

6. Make Apathy Your Core Value

Apathy is the clearest sign that your culture is toxic.

It’s a cancer that spreads within an environment that has implemented the previous five steps. You can rid your team of this cancer if you catch it early, but its only antidote is a strong leader with a worthwhile culture vision.

This is why some organizations are never competitive.

They can change coaches and players. They can improve infrastructure. But there is a primary leader (an owner, an executive) who remains a common thread—always creating the conditions for the preceding five steps while preventing their coaches from making real progress.

Apathy drains the spirit of an organization and erodes its people from within.

7. Destroy Trust with Every Action

Trust has an academic equation:

(Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy) / (Self-Interest) = Trust.

The trick to ensuring your culture becomes its most toxic is by establishing the lowest level of trust. Rank yourself 1-10 in all four variables and do the math. The greatest of Developers can max out at a 30.

Toxic coaches can bottom out at .3.

The road to .3 involves proving you have no knowledge that benefits the player’s growth (credibility). Consistently failing to show up as a leader (reliability) and destroying the vulnerability and connections you have with your players (intimacy). Do all this while prioritizing self-interest at all costs.

Here’s another equation: toxic culture = poor leadership

Final Words

Culture is king.