Whether it’s his pedigree as a former professional athlete or simply the fame and potential that comes with his name, there are plenty of reasons for people to want Tom Brady as part of their organizations. So, ever since he retired from the NFL, the gridiron’s greatest signal caller has found himself investing in various franchises across sports.
Advertisement
And Brady has become more of a ‘people person’ than ever. “Over the course of the last three years, a lot of my time has been focused on talking to people,” he explained in his latest newsletter.
The former New England Patriot is now a minority owner of an English soccer club, a WNBA team, and the Las Vegas Raiders. But according to Brady, building a winning culture is infinitely more important than building a respectable portfolio. And the GOAT has his own definition of “culture”.
It is “the product of people and their values,” wrote Brady. Culture is also incredibly fragile. And 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. [Then], 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,” explained Brady.
The legend admitted that often 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 harm a team.
“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,” stated Brady.
“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. However, setting up such a cultural precedent is easier said than done.
In the eyes of Brady, installing a winning mindset and culture is more of a long-term process rather than a sweeping and quick 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.
The seven-time Super Bowl winner referred to this 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,” added Brady.
Brady added 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.” 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.
Brady had the better part of two decades to help instill such a mindset into the Patriots’ locker room. So it should come as no surprise that the franchise is still aiming to retain its ‘Patriot way’ even though both he and Bill Belichick left quite a while back.
