When you listen to Martin St.Louis talk about his team, a few phrases come up over and over again. "Play the game in front of you." "The league doesn't care." "Success is temporary but character is forever." Out of all the Martyisms though, perhaps the most frequent reference he makes is to the team's culture.
A strong culture is the foundation of success, according to St‑Louis. “You can have the best players, but if your team doesn’t have a good culture, you’re only going to get small pockets of success,” he says.
"Culture" is a small word with a complicated meaning.
Merriam-Webster says it's "the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization." Thomas Wolfe wrote "Culture is the arts, elevated to a set of beliefs."
A few years ago, world-renowned expert in social psychology and communication, Helen Spencer-Oatey, published a paper called "What is Culture?" in an attempt to define what can be a fairly abstract concept.
"Culture is a fuzzy set of basic assumptions and values, orientations to life, beliefs, policies, procedures and behavioural conventions that are shared by a group of people, and that influence (but not determine) each member's behaviour and his interpretations of the 'meaning' of other people's behaviour," she writes. Clear as mud, right?
She goes on to define culture by explaining its characteristics.
"There are three fundamental levels at which culture manifests itself," she writes. "Observable artifacts, values and basic underlying assumptions. When one enters an organization, one observes and feels its artifacts. That's everything from the dress code, the manner in which people address each other, the smell and feel of the place and its emotional intensity." Okay...now we're getting somewhere.
If we apply that understanding of what culture is, we start to get a picture of what St.Louis means when he uses the term. The Bell Centre itself is an artifact, and is filled with the evidence of more than a century of accomplishment. The dress code is the uniform in its simple, iconic pattern. We see the way the players address each other with sibling-like affection and we start to understand.
🏒🏒🏒🏒🏒🏒🏒🏒🏒🏒🏒🏒🏒🏒🏒🏒🏒
Then Spencer-Oatey gets into the heart of what culture is for the Canadiens. She says culture isn't instinctive. It's learned.
"Culture is learned from the people you interact with as you are socialized into a new group," she explains. "Culture is also taught by the explanations people receive for the natural and human events around them."
In this case, it's learned from a teacher...St.Louis...who brings his own values to the group and insists his players adopt them.
He says in his view, culture is based on three main things. First, respect.
"That’s the starting point. You have to treat everyone equally," he stresses. "Whether it’s the young player earning $7 million or the guy washing the equipment."
Next comes accountability to the team. "You have a job to do." By that, he means every person's role is important to the success of the group and because of that, each player must perform not only for himself, but for the others in the room who are depending on him to do his job.
Finally, enthusiasm. "For me, coming to the arena in the morning after a loss, when you got blasted by reporters the day before, and working hard on the ice, is enthusiasm."
So, in St.Louis' mind, and therefore in the minds of his players, the Canadiens culture is a combination of those three main elements. Add to them the coach/philosopher's insistence on hard work, listening and commitment and the picture of what he means by "culture" becomes clearer.
He believes that if a team has talent and buys into the concept, it will have more consistent success; not just the sporadic runs we've seen fizzle over the years.
So, next time we hear St.Louis talk about his team's culture, we'll know what he means.
