What the Blue Jays Can Teach Us About Workplace Culture

I Was Reading The Culture Code and Couldn’t Stop Thinking About the Blue Jays

I recently read The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle, and one of the main examples throughout the book is the San Antonio Spurs dynasty.

The book talks a lot about culture, not the corporate buzzword version of culture, but the kind that shapes how teams respond under pressure, how people treat each other, and ultimately, how they perform.

As I was reading about the Spurs, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Toronto Blue Jays. As a lifelong Jays fan who was lucky enough to be at Game 7 of the ALCS last fall for the Springer Dinger, I still remember the feeling in that stadium. Not just because they were winning, but because of the energy around that team. They genuinely looked like a group of friends who loved playing with each other.

Throughout that playoff run, everyone talked about the talent, and rightfully so. But what stood out most to me was something harder to measure, and that comes up in Coyle’s Culture Code.

The dugout energy, the celebrations, the way players picked each other up after mistakes, the way they seemed loose even in massive moments, and the overall sense of connection across the team.

Thinking about them now is reminiscent of one of the biggest ideas in The Culture Code: behaviour follows environment.

Coyle explores how the Spurs weren’t successful just because they had talented players. They built an environment rooted in trust, belonging, accountability, and psychological safety. Players knew they could contribute without fear. They trusted each other completely, which allowed them to play faster, freer, and more cohesively.

That felt very familiar watching the Jays last year (and this year for that matter, despite the injuries).

And to be clear, this isn’t one of those “culture matters more than talent” arguments. Talent absolutely matters. The Jays were incredibly talented. But culture seemed to amplify that talent, it created confidence, resilience, momentum, and belief that you could feel as a fan.

And I think this is where The Culture Code becomes incredibly relevant to workplaces too.

One of the biggest takeaways from the book is that strong cultures are not built through mission statements or corporate values written on walls. They're built by creating environments where people feel safe enough to contribute fully.

Am I safe to speak up here? Do I belong here? Do my teammates have my back when things go wrong?

When people don’t feel secure, they don’t take risks. They play it safe, protect themselves, and hold back ideas. When they do feel safe, they move faster, communicate more openly, and recover from mistakes instead of hiding them. That is psychological safety in practice, not theory. In teams, that shows up in very real ways: whether people speak up in meetings, how quickly they recover from mistakes, how willing they are to challenge ideas, and whether they actually build on each other’s thinking under pressure.

None of this is particularly revolutionary, but environments where people genuinely feel safe, trusted, and connected are still rarer than they should be.

That’s what the Spurs built, and more recently, the Blue Jays have as well.

You could see it in the way players responded to adversity. The emotional energy of the team was consistently connected. And over the course of a season, or an organization, that matters more than most people realize.

Another idea Coyle talks about is that culture is built through small moments, not big speeches. In a lot of ways, culture is really just, ‘the way we do things around here.’

In workplaces, those same dynamics exist everywhere:

• meetings

• leadership interactions

• team rituals

• feedback conversations

• hybrid collaboration

• everyday communication

Culture isn’t what organizations say. It’s what people experience repeatedly.

And maybe that’s why the best teams, in sports or at work, often feel different before you can even explain why.

Recently, Toronto Blue Jay Vladimir Guerrero Jr. said:

"This is family for me. The team, the city, the fans, this is family. I'm not leaving."

That’s culture, trust, emotional connection, and ultimately identity.

And maybe that’s the bigger lesson from both The Culture Code and the 2025 Blue Jays:

The strongest cultures are not built when everything is easy. They’re built through environments where people consistently feel connected, supported, trusted, and accountable to one another.

Reading The Culture Code made me realize just how deeply performance is shaped by environment, by trust, psychological safety, connection, and whether people truly want to show up for one another.

And honestly, that applies just as much to workplaces as it does to baseball teams.

Strategy matters. Talent matters. Leadership matters.

The environments organizations create ultimately shape how people collaborate, communicate, recover from mistakes, and perform under pressure.

Simple in theory, but still surprisingly rare in practice.