In 2020, two researchers at Harvard Business School produced a case study they believed could help corporate leaders develop their own culture. The subject was Steve Kerr and the guiding values of the Golden State Warriors.
The study highlighted a telling anecdote, from the months after Kerr was hired to coach the Warriors in 2014. As a first-time head coach, he wanted to be prepared. So he went to Seattle and shadowed Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll for three days. During the visit, Carroll asked Kerr how he planned to coach his team.
Kerr was confused: “Like what type of offense will we run?”
“No,” Carroll said. “That’s not what matters most. The key is what type of culture you create and what the guys feel every day when they show up to the arena.”
It was an idea Kerr understood but had never heard expressed until Carroll.
“He told me how it took him 10 years to figure out for himself that to succeed, a coach has to have core values that come alive each and every day and with which the players truly connect,” Kerr said. “Because if the players cannot connect, values just become words on a page.”
In the landscape of modern sports, perhaps no word has become more venerated, ingrained and overused than “culture.” It is uttered at every introductory news conference, praised and cited after big wins, and emphasized by coaches, executives and reporters alike.
But one of the most fascinating things about the corporate world, culture expert Spencer Harrison said, is how many leaders do not understand Carroll’s insight.
Harrison is a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD in France and spends most of his days thinking about culture. His research concerns how leaders foster creativity, coordination and connection. When he’s not looking at Grammy-winning bands or asking how people survive plane crashes, he’s consulting with executives about culture.
When Harrison speaks to business leaders, each one will state the importance of culture and their role in building it. But when he asks them how they achieve it, most do not have a good answer. The reason, he says, is most have never been taught.
“They just know from experience that clearly there is this thing that almost seems undefinable that has an impact on how people are behaving,” Harrison said.
At its core, a culture is what Carroll shared with Kerr: A set of collective core values that guide an organization’s mission, priorities and decision-making.
“I like to say culture is a 24-hour-a-day training program,” said Amy C. Edmondson, a professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School. “It’s the shared assumptions or beliefs about what matters, what works and who matters that shapes behavior in the absence of formal rules.”
Edmondson believes every effective organization has three pillars:
- A clear value proposition that states why the organization exists and what its purpose is. Harvard is a school that exists to educate future leaders.
- A system to carry out that purpose (training programs and equipment, for example).
- A defined culture.
“The culture is what allows us to deliver on that value proposition,” Edmondson said. “Because everybody understands what we do, how we do it, and they don’t need to be reinstructed every minute of the day. In a way, it’s a source of efficiency.”
When Kerr arrived in Golden State, he identified four core values he wanted to build his culture around: joy, competition, compassion and mindfulness. He chose them after consulting with Carroll. The biggest reason was they felt authentic to him.
The challenge for a coach or a business leader is how to get people to embody those values in the spaces where culture is made: meeting rooms, team facilities, daily interactions. Or, as Kerr once put it: How do you take a saying on a locker room wall and make it feel real?
One day earlier this winter, Spencer Harrison was consumed by another culture story: Jimmy Butler and the Miami Heat.
In addition to being an expert on culture, Harrison is a diehard NBA fan, charmed by every morsel of the league drama and intrigue. When he attended a conference on culture at Cal-Berkeley and found himself listening to a panel discussion with Kerr, he raised his hand and asked about the time Michael Jordan infamously punched Kerr in the face.
The Miami Heat have one of the most publicly stated cultures in the NBA, a branding (“Heat Culture”) that began when Pat Riley, first as coach and then as team president, built the team into a championship contender. Riley outlined his core values in plain terms: The Heat would be “the hardest working, best conditioned, most professional, unselfish, toughest, meanest, nastiest team in the NBA.”
The culture, at first, appeared to be a comfortable fit for Butler, the ultra-competitive, hard-charging star. The Heat relaxed rules for Butler, allowing him to fly and lodge separately on road trips. But the relationship between organization and star soon fractured, leading to multiple team-issued suspensions, an awkward standoff and, finally, a trade to the Golden State Warriors.
Jimmy Butler’s standoff with the Miami Heat ended when the Heat traded him to the Golden State Warriors. (Jim Rassol / Imagn Images)
To Harrison, the easiest way to understand the challenge of building culture is to view it in two different, distinct pieces: The set of shared values, passed down from the top, is the “Big C” culture, while everything else, the day-to-day interactions, is a company’s “Small C” culture.
In an article published last year in the MIT Sloan Management Review, Harrison and Marquette professor Kristie Rogers found that companies with vibrant and diverse Small C cultures were more innovative and creative. One reason, Harrison says, is that companies with a strong big-C culture are often long-standing brands with history, tradition and rigid understanding for how things should be done. The recipe can lead to a static culture.
“Whenever there’s a big change in the marketplace or the competitive environment, it’s really hard for those organizations to respond because they’ve sort of been locked into one way of doing things,” Harrison said. “So what ends up happening then is the Big C dominates and kills off the small C because nobody’s attempting to try anything new.”
On the other end of the spectrum, organizations with poor Big C culture — few stated values or a poorly expressed mission — are often adrift, using culture as a scapegoat for anything that goes wrong, from a failed acquisition to a failed strategic initiative.
It’s easy, Harrison said, to say something “did not fit the culture.”
It was a scenario that came to mind after the Dallas Mavericks traded young star Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers for Anthony Davis and a future first-round pick, a trade that stunned the NBA. Dončić, 25, led the Mavericks to the NBA Finals last season and is one of the league’s top players. Mavericks general manager Nico Harrison emphasized that the trade was, in part, about culture.
“There’s people that fit the culture and there’s people that come in and add to the culture, and those are two distinct things,” Harrison told reporters. “And I believe the people that [are] coming in are adding to the culture.”
In a vacuum, it was a plausible explanation. The Mavericks, according to The Athletic, were concerned about Dončić’s conditioning and off-court habits.
“But when the culture has never been expressed,” Spencer Harrison said, “this can quickly be seen as inauthentic and backfire.”
Putting aside the messy basketball merits of the Dončić and Butler deals, as well as acknowledging that sport operates with a more finite pool of high-end talent than most professions, both trades raised another common culture dilemma: What Edmondson calls the issue of the “height performer.”
“The person whose individual performance looks very strong, but the way they behave toward others, essentially harms others abilities to do their very best work,” she said.
“The non-thoughtful manager will keep the bad apple because they’re bringing in the money, they’re bringing in the points. And it will maybe pay off in the short term. But in the long term, you start to erode something very precious. Which is everyone else’s true commitment to what they’re doing, together.”
People like Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, Steelers coach Mike Tomlin, former Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp combine strong vision and values with a vibrant Small C culture. But the research from Harrison and Rogers suggests it’s not just about making players — or employees — feel good about themselves or fostering a healthy work environment. The best managers are those who can make the culture feel alive, who can take a simple moment in a meeting and imbue it with the values of a company.
For example: On the night he made his NBA debut for the San Antonio Spurs, James White wanted to make a statement. It was March 2007, and White came off the bench during a blowout. With six minutes left, he corralled the ball near the paint, made a move and tried to dunk on Matt Barnes.
As White jumped, Barnes shoved him to the ground. It was the kind of physical play that normally would have caused White, a 24-year-old forward who had been with the Spurs for only four months, to jump up and fight back.
“When I was on the ground, I thought, ‘Don’t do nothing stupid because that’s not part of the culture,’” White said. “They wouldn’t do that. The culture there, it was different.”
When Kerr began his first season with the Warriors, he wrote the values on a whiteboard and developed a motto: “Strength in numbers.” He held daily gatherings and tried to interject humor into lessons. He once recalled a conversation with Popovich, who told him that after years of coaching, he realized one of his biggest priorities was to be able to enjoy his day. If he was excited to work, the culture benefited.
But much of culture building remains intangible. Why do some coaches connect and others don’t? Why do some leaders feel authentic and others don’t?
“Everything that happens in practice, everything that the players feel when they walk into the gym or onto the field, every day that they come to the facility, it has to be real,” Kerr told Carroll on their podcast, recalling their first conversation in 2014. “And the values that are important to you as a coach have to come alive. And that’s how culture is defined.
“And when your players feel that and they feel that authenticity coming from you, and it comes alive in practice and in the atmosphere, now there’s something real and the momentum starts to build.”
There’s another story that Kerr likes to tell. It concerns how he structures his practices. No matter what the Warriors are doing that day, Kerr tries to make every drill and every period a competition. The aim reflects one of his core values, and Kerr hopes it rubs off on his players.
But there’s another reason the story might be powerful: It’s that Kerr tells it at all.
After years of research, Spencer Harrison believes that one of the best ways to create a culture is through storytelling. He calls the process “reverse Hansel and Gretel-ing,” and it’s quite simple. When a company has a story it can tell about itself, it can drop it in front, giving it a map to follow. You can find examples in old companies like Hewlett-Packard, which was founded in a one-car garage and used the origin story to retain its core ethos as a scrappy innovator. You can also find examples in teams like the Warriors and Heat.
“The stories symbolize what it means to move forward,” Harrison said. “And so then we pay more attention to those things and then we move forward again.”
In time, you might not even have to repeat the story. Kerr, for instance, only brings up his core values at certain moments. The hope is that, after a while, people can simply feel them.
— Elise Devlin contributed reporting.
(Photo: Keith Birmingham / MediaNews Group / Pasadena Star-News via Getty Images)
