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Episode 3 of 7 in What makes a high-performance culture? Today's question: What makes a sport culture toxic?
Episode 3 of 7 in What makes a high-performance culture? Today's question: What makes a sport culture toxic?
A new coach is hired to fix a culture. He opens every door, and nobody walks through. Through Tomás, a composite story, Dr. MCB works out the three things that were broken at his club, none of which was him. First, whether the place is demanding or damaging: does feedback target what you did or who you are, does disagreement cost you your place, and who ends up managing the leader's moods. Second, where the harm actually starts, with the coach or above the coach, and how to trace it. Third, the toxic triangle of leader, followers and environment that keeps a pattern alive after one person is removed. Along the way she tells two research stories: a brain-imaging study of what putting a feeling into words does to the brain's alarm, and the paper that named the toxic triangle. The episode's answer: harmful behaviour that the organization allows to keep happening, and the person the review names may be only part of it. It closes with a ten-minute weekly check, with at least one person outside the coaching chain and periodic independent review. Its thresholds are practitioner prompts, and never a reason to delay medical care or responding to suspected abuse, a safeguarding concern or immediate danger.
This series draws on The Psychology of High-Performance Sports Organizations: Culture, Safety, and Leadership by Dr. Marie Claire Bourque and Madeline Antony (Routledge). Find the book.
Dr. MCB’s Curiosities is produced by PIPACO Tech. Dr. MCB is a Clinical Instructor at the University of British Columbia and a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary's Cumming School of Medicine. The views expressed are her own and are not endorsed by either university. This podcast is general education, not medical advice, and does not create a doctor–patient relationship.
What are you curious about?
I'm Dr. Marie Claire Bourque, Dr. MCB. I'm a psychiatrist, and I ask a lot of questions. My favourite ones are the ones I don't know the answers to.
That's where Dr. MCB’s Curiosities starts. We take a question about neuroscience, human behaviour, clinical medicine, or something else entirely, and build a podcast episode or series to explore the answer.
I read the research and look at different explanations. What do we know? How do we know it? And what haven't we figured out yet?
You get to follow that search with me, without having to work through all the papers yourself. We'll make sense of the science in plain language, including where the evidence is uncertain or the answer is still taking shape.
You might leave with a clearer answer, a different understanding of something you thought you knew, or another question worth asking.
And if you've got a question I can't answer, send it my way. That's the engine.
Dr. MCB’s Curiosities is produced by PIPACO Tech. Dr. MCB is a Clinical Instructor at the University of British Columbia and a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary's Cumming School of Medicine. The views expressed are her own and are not endorsed by either university. This podcast is general education, not medical advice, and does not create a doctor–patient relationship.
First week on the job, the new head coach stands in front of the whole staff and says: tell me what isn't working, nobody gets in trouble for being honest. And the room just sits there.
His name is Tomás, and he isn't a real person: he's a composite, built from patterns I've seen many times, with the details changed. But that silence is real, and today I want to explore the silence that so often happens in elite sport.
Tomás was hired to fix a culture. The coach before him had been fired after an investigation into how players were treated, and the board wanted something visible: a new face and a clean start. He arrived with a ninety-day plan and an open door policy, sincerely believing that trust would follow. By the second month he'd opened every door he could find, and nobody was walking through, so he read the silence as resistance.
Here's what he couldn't see. Under the last coach, senior players had tried speaking up, but one questioned a tactical call and then sat out for an entire month. Under the old coach, a staffer had taken concerns to the sporting director's office, the proper channel, and watched for months as nothing changed. None of these people trusted that those things wouldn't happen again. They weren't going to try again. A person's nervous system doesn't reset because the name on the door changed.
And then there was the handover report. The operations manager had written up what the new coach was walking into: people flinching when a voice was raised, senior players keeping the young ones in line, and assistants still running the old playbook. Instead of handing it to the coach, her boss put it in a drawer. "Don't poison the well. Let him build from a clean slate."
The problem with clean slates is that they don't exist. History follows.
Because the new coach, Tomás, never read the handover report, he read the silence as apathy in what was really scar tissue. He treated it with more invitations, when what that building really needed was proof, something people could see. The building needed proof that speaking up was safe and that speaking up would result in change.
Instead the building remained silent. Because that's what it had learned.
His end-of-season review said the senior group hadn't bought in, and suggested leadership changes. The handover report never came up, and nobody asked what that building had been taught about the price of honesty, long before Tomás ever walked in.
This series is about elite sport, and we're answering one big question: what makes a high-performance culture? Each episode takes one smaller question on the way there. This is episode three of seven, and today's question is the one you have to answer before you're allowed to fix anything: what makes a sport culture toxic? We are looking to make a cultural diagnosis.
Welcome to Dr. MCB’s Curiosities. I ask a lot of questions, and my favourite ones are the ones I don't know the answers to. So, let's find the answers!
Today's question answers the question of the third layer of what I call the High-Performance Culture Operating System. I'm a doctor, so I'm used to looking at things from a diagnostic lens. In medicine, we don't treat until we understand the diagnosis. So, let's start where medicine starts. Tired, losing weight, sweating at night? Each alone could be a dozen things. The practice is recognizing when they cluster into a pattern, that's the diagnosis, and where that pattern comes from, that's the pathology. You do this before you reach for a fix, the treatment. A culture works the same way, and Tomás reached for the fix first.
So here's what I want to do today. Three things were broken at Tomás's club, and he couldn't see any of them. By the end of this episode, I want you to be able to name all three, and to know how you'd look for each one in your own building.
What are we going to explore? They come in three questions: is this place demanding or damaging? Where does the pathology actually start? What keeps it alive after the person who caused it has left?
Before the first question, a word about the word toxic, because it gets thrown around a lot. A coach having a bad week is not a toxic culture. So what is a toxic culture? The way I think about it, toxicity is a system that produces harm in a predictable pattern and keeps producing it. It does that because of how consequences land, how information moves, and what the place protects instead of correcting.
There's a research tradition behind that, on what's called destructive leadership: sustained behaviour by leaders that grinds people down, through hostility, manipulation or neglect, plus the conditions that let it last. When two leadership researchers pooled those studies in 2013, they found it consistently worsens wellbeing, job satisfaction and commitment. Most of that research comes from ordinary workplaces, not sport, and that's a limit I'll keep coming back to.
And here's the nasty part. A toxic system damages the one thing that could catch it, because the people who'd report it have learned not to. By the time someone files a formal complaint, in my experience, the place has been hurting people for months. That fits what two psychologists who study mistreatment at work found in 2003: most of the employees they surveyed who spoke up about mistreatment faced some kind of retaliation.
So diagnosis can't be left to chance. It has to be somebody's actual job, not something you hope a good leader notices.
First, is the place demanding or damaging? The most common mistake I see is confusing the two. High standards don't make a culture toxic, but being frozen out for no reason, punished for honesty, and power nobody checks, those do. Here's how I tell them apart.
Take feedback first: demanding feedback is direct, specific, and about something the person can change, while damaging feedback goes after who you are, in front of others. When you're sorting this one, watch for the coach who takes a player into the hallway and talks about the pass, versus the one who stops in front of the room and talks about the person.
Standards are next: demanding standards are high, clear, and the same for everyone. Damaging ones move without warning, and they apply to some people and not others. The tell is what happens when the captain breaks the same rule the rookie broke last week. Do they get the same consequence, or a different one?
Then mistakes: in a demanding place, a mistake is something to learn from. In a damaging one, it's used to put you in your place. You'll see it in what happens after an error in training: with a demanding coach the conversation gets longer, and with a damaging one it gets shorter.
Then disagreement: in a demanding place, pushing back is expected and protected. In a damaging one, it costs you minutes, selection, or a seat at the table.
And then emotion, which for me is the tell. A demanding leader manages their own moods. In a damaging environment, the athletes manage the leader's moods. So notice who adjusts when the coach walks into the room. Is it the coach reading the group, or the whole group reading the coach?
Let me be honest about that list: it's a practitioner's tool, not a validated test. It's built from the research on destructive leadership, and from Ashley Stirling and Gretchen Kerr at the University of Toronto, who have spent years studying emotional abuse in coaching, much of it by interviewing athletes who lived through it. Nearly every environment has a bit of both columns. The question is which one is winning, and whether the damaging parts get dealt with or tolerated. And the same behaviour can land differently on two athletes.
But here's the rough rule I use: a demanding place makes people sharper, and a damaging place makes them smaller.
The line gets crossed in two places: when the feedback is about who you are instead of what you did, and when keeping the coach calm has become the athlete's job.
Now let's run Tomás's club through that list. Under the last coach, a senior player questioned a tactical call and sat out for an entire month. That's disagreement costing you minutes, which puts it squarely in the damaging column, and a month out of the team is a lesson everyone in a building learns from. So when Tomás stood up in his first week and said nobody gets in trouble for being honest, he was asking people to believe something their own memory told them wasn't true.
That's the first thing that was broken. The place had been damaging, and people had learned exactly what honesty cost.
And they hadn't all learned the same lesson. Last episode we separated three kinds of silence: people who are scared, people who have given up, and people who stay quiet out of loyalty. Those names help us separate the motives. They don't tell us why a particular person is quiet; for that, you have to listen, and look at what has happened to them. Tomás's building had two of the three. There was fear, from the player who sat out a month. And there was futility, from the staffer who took concerns to the sporting director's office, the proper channel, and watched for months as nothing changed.
Tomás treated all of it as a fear problem, with more invitations and more open doors. But the futility half needed something else: one person to speak, one thing to change, and everybody to see it.
Diagnose the wrong silence and you don't just waste the effort. You teach people that the silence was right.
One more thing about this first question, and this is my clinical view: naming the pattern is itself an intervention. People in these environments stop trusting their own perception. They decide they're the problem: not tough enough, the wrong fit. And naming helps, for a reason that has been shown in a brain scanner.
In 2007, Matthew Lieberman, a social neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues wanted to know what putting a feeling into words does in the brain. So they put volunteers in a scanner and showed them photographs of frightened and angry faces, the kind of picture that reliably sets off the amygdala, the brain's alarm. Sometimes the person had to match a face to another with the same expression. Sometimes they had to pick the word that fit: scared, or angry. Nobody was asked to calm down or to feel anything differently. And yet when people picked the word, the amygdala quietened compared with the other tasks. A region at the front of the brain on the right side, the thinking part, worked harder, and the more it did, the quieter the alarm got. The surprise was that the labelling did the work by itself, with no instruction to regulate anything. It's one lab study of people looking at photographs, not a treatment trial, so I hold it lightly. But it fits what I see in a clinic and in a dressing room. The moment an athlete can say, "this isn't me, this is the system," something in them settles enough to think.
So that's our diagnosis: demanding or damaging, sharper or smaller. But if you stopped there, you'd make the same mistake Tomás's board made, and the second question is where reviews often go wrong.
Now here's the turn, because everything so far could be read as a case against the last coach. Get rid of him, bring in someone decent, and the problem's solved. That's exactly what Tomás's board believed.
But the harm you can see at the athlete level often doesn't start there. It starts above the coach and comes down.
In medicine, this is the pathology question: where is the problem actually coming from? Two teams of management researchers tested this in organizations. One, in 2009, asked how far ethical leadership at the top flows down. The other, in 2012, asked the same about abusive bosses. Both found that how senior leaders behave, ethical or not, flows down through the tiers of an organization. Board demands, a volatile owner, media scrutiny, money trouble: all of it lands on whoever sits between the boardroom and the dressing room. Instability at the top becomes mood swings, shifting standards and hoarded information in the middle. At the front, it becomes anxiety, silence and people leaving. And the top usually can't see it, because information going up gets filtered.
Now look at what happened above Tomás. The board wanted something visible, a new face and a clean start. The way I read it, that tells you what the board was managing: how the club looked. And the one document that explained what Tomás was walking into, the handover report, went into a drawer, so that he could build from a clean slate. So the decision to keep the new coach blind was made by someone else, and the review that followed blamed the senior players instead.
That's the second thing that was broken. The harm in that building didn't start or stop with one coach, and his end-of-season review never looked past the dressing room.
So how do you tell, in your own building? Here are three cascade questions I use.
One: is the problem in one tier or several? If the players say the coaches are unpredictable, and the staff say management is, and both chains lead to the same executives, that's a cascade.
Two: does the behaviour get worse after board meetings, an ownership change, or a bad week in the press? Lay the coach's worst stretches against the executive calendar. If they line up, he may be carrying the pressure, not creating it.
Three: do the coaches describe feeling blamed, unsupported or shut out from above, in the same words the athletes use about them?
Two yeses out of three, and the harm probably starts upstream, so the fix has to reach that high. Those numbers are rules of thumb, not validated cut-offs. And listen to the players and the staff separately. If a defender and a physio who've never compared notes describe the same pattern, the pressure is probably coming from above both of them.
Sometimes the coach is the source, and there are tells for that too. The behaviour stays the same no matter who's on the board. The coaches next door are fine. And the harm people describe is tied to this person, in this room.
If the harm moves with the person, the person is the problem. If it stays in the building after they leave, the building is.
Two cautions go with that. These questions give you a direction, not a verdict, and they don't replace a proper investigation. And finding the source upstream doesn't shrink the harm downstream, or excuse the person causing it. Athletes don't experience a cascade; they experience whoever is in front of them. So you fix the cause above and repair the harm below, and you do both.
So that's the second question: the coach, or above the coach? At Tomás's club, the honest answer was both: a damaging coach, and a board managing how things looked. But that still doesn't explain why the harm was waiting for Tomás after the old coach had gone. That's the third question, and it's the one that explains why replacing a coach often doesn't work.
In psychiatry, we'd call these perpetuating factors: the things that keep a problem going after whatever started it is gone. In culture, there's a paper that describes them well. In 2007, Art Padilla, Robert Hogan and Robert Kaiser, three researchers who work on leadership and personality, published a paper they called the toxic triangle. They went through what was known about destructive leaders: the charisma, the appetite for power, the narcissism. They also looked at the people who follow, and at the places where it happens. And they argued that destructive leadership is never a solo act. Every time, there are followers who go along, some because they have needs the leader promises to meet, like belonging, security or a future, and some because going along pays. And every time, there's an environment that makes it possible: instability, a sense of threat, and no real check on the leader's power. You can't understand the leader without the other two corners, they concluded.
So toxicity isn't just a bad leader. It's three things reinforcing each other: a destructive leader, followers who've been made susceptible, and an environment that lets it happen.
Now look at Tomás's club through that triangle, because all three corners were there before he arrived. The leader corner was the coach who'd been fired. While he was there, you'd probably have heard the sentence that protects that corner in a lot of buildings: "He's tough, but he gets the best out of people." Early results buy tolerance, and that sentence is the shield.
The follower corner was still in the building after he left: senior players keeping the young ones in line, and assistants still running the old playbook. That's not about weak people; it's what going along looks like when going along was the price of a place.
And the environment corner was still standing too: a proper channel that didn't do anything, a board that wanted a clean start more than a clear picture, and a report in a drawer.
They removed one corner, and the other two were waiting for Tomás.
So think of a problem in your own building that came back after someone left. Which corner was still standing?
There's one move I'd teach everyone to spot in the environment corner. Jennifer Freyd, a psychologist at the University of Oregon who has spent decades studying betrayal and trauma, and her colleagues call it DARVO: deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. A report lands, and the organization says it didn't happen, goes after the person who raised it, and recasts itself as the injured party. When a place answers reports that way, Freyd calls it institutional betrayal. The answer, she says, is institutional courage: telling the truth even when it costs the institution.
So here's the line to keep. Before you decide who's the problem, put a different person in that chair and ask whether they'd end up doing the same things. If the answer is yes, removing the coach gets you a press release, not a repair. Look at all three corners, because whichever one you skip is the one that grows it back.
So what was broken at Tomás's club? Three things, and we can name them now. The place had been damaging, and it had taught people what honesty cost. A board and a chain of managers were handling how things looked rather than what was happening. And two corners of the triangle were still standing after the third was removed.
None of them was Tomás, and the review still suggested leadership changes.
Now, the objection, and it usually sounds like this: "You're making normal coaching sound like a disease. Put any demanding coach under this lens and they look toxic." It's a fair worry, and it's why I started with demanding versus damaging. The line was never intensity. It's behaviour versus identity, and who carries the leader's emotions. And the pooled evidence says destructive leadership does measurable harm that high expectations don't explain. So try it on a concern you have right now. If it lands on the demanding side and the three cascade questions come back no, it's intense, not toxic. If it lands on the damaging side and the people leaving are all saying the same thing, the lens is doing its job.
So what do you do on a Tuesday morning? It takes ten minutes a week and three people: the head coach, the performance director, and someone senior from medical or psychology. At least one of them has to sit outside the coaching chain, and every few months someone independent reads the log. And you ask three check-in questions.
One: did anyone go quiet this week who's usually vocal, or blow up in a way that's out of character? Quiet is the easy one to miss, because it makes no noise. There's a practitioner's word for skilled people who get sidelined and stop trying. It isn't a research label, but it's useful: rust-out. Rust-out is invisible, because it looks like someone quietly doing their job.
Buildings respond to noise. Rust-out makes none.
Two: did anyone's output change suddenly, better or worse, with no change in training to explain it? One pattern to look hard for here is burnout without overload. The questionnaire that defined burnout, built by two psychologists in 1981, names three signs: exhaustion, going numb, and feeling you achieve nothing. If you see all three and the training load hasn't changed, the workload isn't the stressor; the system is.
Three: did anyone mention doubts about staying, or drop out of the informal stuff, like the optional breakfast or the card game on the bus?
Any yes, write it down, because one yes is not a crisis, it's a data point. An entry might read: "The head physio, who normally fights us on return-to-play timelines, agreed instantly today and didn't make eye contact."
For these routine observations, escalate when the same person is flagged three weeks running, or when two or more yeses land across different people in one week. Escalate, too, when departures cluster. Three or more people leaving in a short window, outside the normal contract cycle, deserves an investigation, not an explanation. Then run the three cascade questions.
These escalation points are prompts for reviewing a pattern. They are never a reason to wait when someone needs help. An injury needing care, suspected abuse or a safeguarding concern goes straight to the appropriate medical or safeguarding route. If someone is in immediate danger, get urgent help; don't wait for next week's meeting or three flags. And this is a practitioner's routine built on research on silence, burnout and trickle-down leadership, not a validated instrument. For proper measurement, there are validated questionnaires for psychological safety, athlete burnout and abusive supervision.
Where does the research stop? Most of what I've described comes from workplaces, not stadiums. The sport-specific evidence is mostly smaller studies of abusive coaching. The sorting list, the cascade questions and the weekly check are practitioner tools: they give you a direction, not a score. Rust-out is a practitioner's term, not a measured construct. And thresholds shift in youth sport, in individual sports and outside Western coaching cultures, so everything today is a tendency, not a law.
Madeline Antony and I wrote the full framework up in a book, The Psychology of High-Performance Sports Organizations: Culture, Safety, and Leadership. The link is in the episode notes.
So, what makes a sport culture toxic? Here's the answer: harmful behaviour that the organization allows to keep happening, and the person the review names may be only part of it. Before you fix anything, you need three things. Is the place demanding or damaging: does feedback target what you did or who you are, and who carries the leader's emotions? Where does the pathology start: at the coach, or above the coach, where the same pattern repeats under different people? And which corner of the triangle, leader, followers or environment, is keeping it alive?
Tomás's board replaced the leader and left everything else in place. The silence he inherited wasn't resistance. It was an accurate reading of what that building had taught people.
Only proof would have changed it: proof that speaking up was safe, and that speaking up would result in change.
So here's what that adds to our big question: a high-performance culture is one that can tell a demanding environment from a damaging one, finds where the harm actually comes from, including above the coach, and fixes that, instead of replacing one person and hoping.
Next time, question four: how do we decide when it matters? It starts with one page: three conduct incidents in six weeks, the same behaviour each time, three different responses, and the one thing that decided them.
That's Dr. MCB’s Curiosities. I hope you learned something. I sure did. Can't wait to ask more questions with you. See you next time! Dr. MCB’s Curiosities is produced by PIPACO Tech. I'm a Clinical Instructor at the University of British Columbia and a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary's Cumming School of Medicine. The views here are my own and aren't endorsed by either university, and this podcast is general education, not medical advice.