Dr Haroot Hakopian: Create a climate and define a team culture

Dr Haroot Hakopian got into coaching by accident when he suffered a significant knee injury - tearing his ACL, MCL and PCL - and requiring four different operations.

A move into coaching followed, alongside entering education. Thirty years later, he is still involved in, and loving, both worlds.

Dr Hakopian celebrated 20 years as an AP English teacher and girls’ soccer coach at Winston Churchill High School in Maryland last year. He also holds numerous other roles, including sitting on the United Soccer Coaches’ board of directors.

SCW caught up with him to talk about culture, climate, and the importance of telling your players when you’ve messed up…

SCW: What’s the difference between culture and climate?

HH: "Climate is a temporary thing. Let’s say a [college] freshman took a calculus test and absolutely bombed it. She’s in a horrible mood when she comes to training.

"That mood sets the climate. It’s temporary - it can last an hour, it can last a day.

"As a coach, you might notice that player spreading that negativity, or that there were five players in the same class that took that calculus test.

"You have to be in tune with external factors affecting the momentary climate of the team and address them - maybe joke around about how horrible you are at math. 

"It requires you checking in with players real quick as they do their warm-ups - walk around and check the climate of the team.

"Consistent climate with a team establishes the culture. There is no agreed definition of culture, but the easiest way to explain it is the unwritten rules that lead to the way we do things, negative or positive. 

"So using a personal example, a senior called Bianca - a phenomenal athlete, who worked her tail off to make the varsity team - tore her ACL in the second game and was out for the remainder of the season.

"The team rallied around her. They all made her cards, went to her house and delivered her favorite treats.

"That’s culture - it’s the way we do things. Not established rules or policies.

"Climate and culture are very closely related. If you don’t pay attention to a negative climate, eventually that becomes a negative culture.

“The climate is the coach’s responsibility. [In terms of] the culture, your job as a coach is to make yourself obsolete so even if you’re not there, it permeates everything you do. 

“Your language as a coach is really important. I started figuring out positive things for the kids to say.

"I stole this from my dissertation advisor at Vanderbilt University. Whenever we made mistakes on anything - whether it was research or analysis - his immediate response was: ‘Do the next best thing’.

“So don’t worry about what just happened, do the next best thing. I used that with my team and they started repeating that to each other when somebody was making an error.

"Now you have a climate thing. A simple phrase permeating the culture and all the kids take it with them wherever they go."

SCW: How did you land on the culture and climate idea?

HH: "I joke that it was accidental genius! I started my doctorate at Vanderbilt in leadership and learning.

“A lot of that focused on leadership not being this amazing personality of a leader, but expanding who the leaders are.

"One of the greatest lines during that program was, ‘In order to be a really powerful person, you have to give up power, and then you get it back’.

“That was really interesting. I found that we talk a lot about climate and culture, but when I dug down and talked to some coaches I knew, they didn’t know the difference between those two things.

“It was fascinating to me because everybody was interested in improving both. They had the idea, intuitively, of taking care of your players [being] step number one. If you do that, you’re starting to build a good climate and culture. 

“But the most interesting aspect is, when you make a mistake, what happens? What do you do? Do you ask your players to evaluate?

“When we’re with our team, it’s very hard to be self-reflective. You’re leading a group who are vastly different in personality and then you’re trying to evaluate and reflect - ’did I do this right? Did I do that right?’.

“We are very reluctant to stand up in front of players and be like, ‘I completely screwed that up. I’m sorry. Let’s fix it.’ That’s a really interesting aspect of climate and culture."