Culture Lessons from MLB's Smallest-Market Team – Which Just Won the World Series
What the Milwaukee Brewers’ World Series win can teach leaders about Culture Renovation®: Protect what makes you special. Change what holds you back. Build what you need next.
The surveys are in. You’ve listened to employees and leaders, looked at where work is getting stuck, and the evidence points to something bigger than a process or policy problem: your organization’s culture needs to change.
But what, exactly, should change? Some of the behaviors, traditions, and ways of working that define your organization may be precisely what’s worth protecting. Others may have become barriers to where the business needs to go next. How do you tell the difference? What stays, what changes, and how do you move forward without losing something essential along the way?
Those were some of the questions that came to mind as I watched the Milwaukee Brewers accomplish something no one saw coming: winning their first World Series championship.
I’ll be honest- they weren’t the first things that came to mind. There was some celebrating to do first. I’m not from Wisconsin, but I’ve called it home for a long time, after all.
Getting better without losing what matters
If you live here long enough, you learn that this team’s identity is bigger than any one season. Paul Molitor, Robin Yount, and the sound of Bob Uecker’s voice are part of a shared history. New players, new leaders, better strategy, and now a first World Series championship become part of that story, too.
That’s part of what makes this Brewers team so interesting to me. They found a way to reach a level the franchise never had before while holding onto a strong sense of who they are. Throughout their run, “team first” wasn’t just something they talked about. It showed up in how they played, prepared, and helped one another succeed.
That’s what brought me back to Culture Renovation®: changing how an organization works while protecting what still makes it worth belonging to. At i4cp, we use this methodology to help leaders figure out what to preserve, what to change, and how to make the culture they want real in the way people work.
What is worth protecting?
i4cp’s Culture Renovation® research, drawing on responses from nearly 7,700 business professionals, identified 18 leadership actions across three phases: Plan, Build, and Maintain. One finding is especially relevant to the question of what comes with you: among organizations with successful culture transformations, 57% intentionally preserved their best existing norms and carried their fundamental values and history into the new culture.
The harder decision is determining which parts of the current culture deserve that protection. A useful test is whether a norm still strengthens how people work and supports where the organization needs to go next, or whether people are preserving it simply because it is familiar.
The Brewers’ “team first” mentality makes that distinction concrete. After the championship, Brewers manager Pat Murphy said: “It’s gotta be about team. You gotta care about your teammates.” Wisconsin Sports Heroics described players extending rallies and handing leads to the next reliever. In the workplace, the equivalent might be sharing information early or making sure the next team has what it needs rather than declaring your own part finished and leaving someone else to pick up the pieces.
That’s what makes “team first” worth more than the phrase itself. It creates expectations for how people contribute to one another’s success.
Plan: Listen, enlist leaders, set the path
To decide what will help or hinder the organization’s future, leaders first need an honest picture of the culture people experience today.
Two-thirds of organizations reporting successful transformations began by gathering stakeholder sentiment and related data about their current and desired culture. Listening helps leaders see where the culture supports good work, where it gets in the way, and who will influence what happens next.
Then people need a clear sense of where they are headed and what getting there will require from them. ESPN reported that Brewers captain Christian Yelich asked the group to commit to winning the World Series while connecting that ambition to preparation and accountability. The destination mattered, but not as much as defining what reaching it would require from the team.
Business leaders need to make the same connection: What are we trying to accomplish? What about our culture will help us get there? And what will have to change?
Build: Turn values into ways of working
Once those choices are made, people need to know what they mean in practice.
That’s where “team first” becomes more useful than a statement on a wall. If it matters to the culture, people should be able to recognize the behaviors behind it: prepare well, share information early, make a good handoff, and help the next person succeed.
Build turns cultural expectations into something people can practice. Leaders need to explain what is changing, give people opportunities to learn new ways of working, and model those expectations themselves.
A value becomes believable when people can see what it means in everyday work.
Maintain: Keep it going as people change
The next test is whether those expectations can survive beyond the people who were there when the change began.
Onboarding, performance management, moves between roles, and succession give organizations opportunities to reinforce how people are expected to contribute. Without that reinforcement, culture depends too heavily on people remembering, interpreting, and passing along the original intent themselves.
Former Brewers outfielder Geoff Jenkins described expectations being taught in the minor leagues before players reach Milwaukee. His example makes the principle tangible: people should learn how to contribute to the culture before they are expected to carry it forward.
That gives leaders a practical test: Can someone new explain what the team expects and how to contribute, or can they only repeat a value statement?
Getting better without starting over
Culture Renovation® means protecting what gives an organization its identity while changing what holds it back. At i4cp, I help leaders turn those choices into values and behaviors that help people contribute and the business perform.
Before your next culture conversation, ask:
- What is worth keeping, and what gets in the way?
- What will our culture need to help us accomplish next?
- Can people see the behaviors behind the values we say matter?
- Could someone new learn how to contribute here?
The Brewers give me a way to see Culture Renovation® beyond the research pages: getting better without starting over, and finding better ways to live what matters.
How ready is your culture for what comes next? Read our recent research Building a Future-Ready Organization with a Change-Ready Culture to understand why some organizations manage to adapt so quickly to disruption, while others stall.