Whether it’s his pedigree as a former professional athlete or simply the fame and notoriety that comes with his last name, there are plenty of reasons as to why you’d want Tom Brady to be a member of your organization. Ever since he retired from the NFL, the gridiron’s greatest signal caller has found himself investing in various franchises, and he’s now more of a ‘people person’ than anything else.
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“Over the course of the last three years, a lot of my time has been focused on talking to people,” Brady explained in his most recent newsletter. The former New England Patriot is now a minority owner of a soccer club, a WNBA team, and the Las Vegas Raiders, but according to the man himself, building a winning culture is infinitely more important than building a respectable portfolio.
To Brady, culture is best defined as “…the product of people and their values.” It’s also incredibly fragile. If everyone in an organization isn’t adhering to the same principles and rules, it can easily fall apart.
“As a leader or a boss, if you set the standard and make the rules, but you then don’t live up to that standard and you break those rules because you think they don’t apply to you—everyone will see through it, and think that if you can break the rules, so can they. That’s the fastest way for a culture to crumble.”
Brady also admitted that too many times in sports, teams have different sets of rules—one for the regular guys and one for the stars or the leaders. According to Brady, this can severely impact a team in the longer run.
“You can get away with that when you’re winning, but it’s fatal the moment you face any amount of sustained adversity, especially if the failure you’re confronting is the result of not embodying the values you’ve claimed to embrace. That’s when the cracks in your culture reveal themselves. The locker room gets divided, the team starts to underachieve, and fingers start getting pointed,” he added.
Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done. In the eyes of Brady, installing a winning mindset and culture is a more of a process rather than a sweeping act of change. Accountability, dedication, and a removal of the ego are all necessary in order to get a team on the same page, anything short of that will cause the entire locker room to immediately begin unraveling. For the seven-time Super Bowl winner, this is best referred to as “the disease of ‘it’s not my fault.'”
“Saying “it’s not my fault” is never the right way to deal with adversity. The opposite is true, if anything. We have to say, “it is our fault and we need to fix it.” Then we have to ask, “how do we get to the solutions?” That’s what a great culture is all about.”
Thankfully, Brady suggests that once the work has been done and the rules have been adhered to, “a good, strong, well-built culture” will inevitably become “self-sustaining.” Much like ourselves, Brady believes that a culture matures with time, leaving behind its values long after its original founders are gone.
From there, the momentum of those values will carry on through the next members of the organization. Simply put, sustaining a culture is easy, but installing one is anything but.
Considering that Brady had the better part of the last two decades to help instill such a mindset into the Patriots’ locker room, perhaps it should come as no surprise to see that the franchise is still aiming to retain its ‘Patriot way’ even though both he and Bill Belichick have been removed from the premises for quite some time now.
