What is culture? Why is it important? How do you build it? Something I never thought about in high school but have recently learned to care a lot about. Over my years at Purdue, we've worked hard to foster a positive, supportive, and fun atmosphere by focusing on our culture in and out of practice. I wanted to talk about what I've learned, and why it’s important.
In high school, we had a pretty good team culture, but I think I took it for granted. Obviously, there were flaws...given that none of us even knew what team culture was. However, I was lucky enough to reap the benefits anyway. To me, a strong team culture is one that involves open and honest communication, vulnerability, common goals, and support from teammates on and off the track. To foster a good team culture, everyone must be willing to be vulnerable with their teammates. However, this will only happen if they can do so for a team willing to give them unwavering support with no judgment. That's a short summary, but there are so many different aspects of each part that make building a team culture complicated and only successful on a team where everyone is bought into a common goal.
Last fall, our team was struggling, and it led to the culture falling like a house of cards. Basically, we were all consumed with our own struggles, and were unable to support and communicate with each other. I can only explain from my point of view, which likely misses some important parts, but I'll try my best to get my point across. Last cross country season, I was going through my own issues with fueling and poor performance, which I had been partially open about, but was afraid of the judgment. I was trying my best to navigate these problems with the support staff and coach, but I was so consumed by them that I couldn’t offer help to others or contribute to the team culture in a positive way. I felt bad about this and blamed the falling culture on myself, but again, I was not open about this with the team. When I blocked out this communication, it put me in a silo, and I closed myself off. As a team, we were not performing well. I was frustrated with my own performance and our team scores, but since that line of team communication was cut, it felt like no one else was as motivated to change or as frustrated with our performances as I was. Obviously, this was of course not true, but it wasn't until we started fixing things when I was able to see the bigger picture.
The absolute first step to fixing our team culture was to reopen the line of communication. A successful team culture cannot function without this. After talking to coach about my frustrations with the team, he said to talk to someone else on the team and create a plan. I did this, and immediately felt better, it turns out we were both thinking the same thing about the team's performance, and I wasn't alone *insert blown mind emoji*. We sat down and formed a plan. The next step was to have a team meeting with the intended goal to create a plan to fix these issues. However, the meeting took an unexpected turn. It turns out everyone had had a very similar past few months as me, consumed in their own issues, cutting off communication. This first meeting consisted of everyone sharing their struggles from the past few months. In the moment, it wasn't very helpful because it seemed like we all had a lot of problems and no one had a solution, but it gave everyone a chance to be vulnerable and showed that no one was alone. It blew that line of communication wide open.
Once I was able to communicate again, I found someone else on the team experiencing similar issues as me and we were able to bond and share our experiences. This not only allowed me to feel less alone, but I was able to feel that support that I had been missing. After everyone shared what they had been struggling with, the vulnerability allowed us to feel closer as a team and offer the support we all needed.
The next step was to find our common goals. Obviously, we would all love to PR, score in big races, and win, but we needed more specific goals, as well as smaller process goals along the way. To do this, the next meeting consisted of figuring out what our vision for the team in the future looked like. How we wanted to communicate and support each other, what we wanted practices to look like, and how we were going to build excitement and motivation towards racing. It was important to find an end goal that consisted of more than results. Although results are important, that's not why we had this meeting. We did this to rebuild the culture. Focusing on results gives motivation without a path. It’s one thing to have the goal of a BIG10 championship, but it’s another to have smaller goals that will LEAD to a BIG10 championship. We are not focusing on the culture to win championships; we are building it to preserve the love for the sport and find the excitement and motivation in practice and in races. A side effect of doing so happens to be performing well and achieving result-oriented goals.
Something we've done in the past while creating this culture goal was create a culture board. After picturing the team we wanted, we put those goals into words that got put on a posted board as a reminder to what we are working for every day. It’s a way to easily summarize our goals and give a quick reminder when things get tough.
**Our culture board from freshman year**
We also started integrating smaller process goals. We meet as a team once a month, to make a goal for the next month. We would talk about what we've been doing well and what we want to see improvement in. From there we would make a goal. Some examples include coming to practice with a good attitude to keep the practice atmosphere upbeat and exciting, talking and supporting more in workouts, and communicating more outside of practice. We then come to the next team meeting and reflect on how we did in achieving said goal.
These few things we did allowed for big steps towards improving the culture. Last year, we did this specifically as the distance/cross country team. Since cross country is a separate sport from the track team, we tend to function as a separate team for a lot of the aspects of training, practice, racing, etc. Even so, we currently are experiencing a lot of the same issues as a track team. It's easy to make excuses as to why we are so separate from the rest of the team, but it's no excuses, so we plan on changing that this year. Since each event group functions as a small team until meet day, it’s hard to foster a cohesive team culture where we can communicate and support each other across event groups in the same way we've learned to do in the distance group. Last spring the coaching staff started to fix this. Again, it started with communication. A meeting where everyone could share their experiences and frustrations. This allowed us to break down those barriers and get us a step closer to a cohesive team culture. I won't say too much about this topic since we still have a long way to go, but this year we have a goal set to move the culture in a positive way similarly to the way we've done on the distance side. This will allow for the ideal team culture I defined at the beginning to form.
Overall, we've spent the past year working hard on the culture to make practice a fun place where everyone can feel motivated, confident, and supported. Since the team is ever changing, so is the culture. This isn't something we can fix and then leave alone. It requires constant work and reevaluation to keep it functional. This year we plan to continue to build what we've started as well as including the track team so form and more cohesive team as a whole.
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