For The Real Scoop On The Braves’ World Series Success, Look At Their Team Culture

This is what can happen when your whole team ‘screams for ice cream.’

C’mon. Who doesn’t smile at the mention of ice cream? The World Champion Atlanta Braves sure do. Ever since they endured a miserable night being pelted by rain at Boston’s Fenway Park back in May, they have embraced the soft and silky wonderfulness of ice cream. It has become a rallying cry—or at the very least, an excuse to get together and just be happy.

They lost the battle to Boston that night, 9-5, but you could argue the Braves won as they’ve just won the franchise’s second ever World Series title. As the rain was coming down that night in Boston and the game was delayed for nearly three hours, the Braves players took advantage of access to a soft serve ice cream machine in the visitor’s clubhouse. And if you were the Atlanta Braves, a long way from home and waiting out a rain delay that only prolonged your agony, you’d help yourself to some vanilla, wouldn’t you? Or maybe chocolate.

The Braves certainly did and liked it so much they petitioned successfully to get a machine installed in their own clubhouse when they returned to Truist Park.

Then guess what happened? No, surprisingly the entire team didn’t gain 100 pounds and have to go on Weight Watchers. On the contrary, the team’s individual stars began meshing, while the team itself went from slogging along several games below .500 to earning a place in the World Series for the first time since 1999. In fact, Atlanta became only the fourth team in history to go from below .500 at the all Star break to a spot in the World Series.

Was it because of soft serve? That might be a stretch. But don’t discount its importance, the players say.

We have used this space before to show that there are many ways and opportunities for people who work together to enjoy one another’s company. One sure-fire way is to be successful and “win” on your field of play. The joy of being the best is the number one reason we compete in the first place—why we strategize and put together the best teams we possibly can.

The drive to compete and win is what drove the Atlanta Braves to assemble the best and most competitive roster they could this year. And when injuries to some key players forced them to make some trades and reconfigure things a bit differently than they might have done, they did so. Give Atlanta’s coaching staff a big hand for turning a group of relative strangers into a team working together on and off the field.

But give pitching ace Josh Tomlin, who led the “ice cream petition,” and his mates credit for having the wisdom to know that when a key missing ingredient practically jumped into the mixing bowl by itself on that rainy night in Boston, they knew to include it in their recipe for success.

For myself, I like popcorn at work and bought an old-fashioned popcorn popper that is parked in a prominent reception area of our offices. It satisfies not only the inevitable afternoon munchies that affect all of us in the course of a workday, but also our need to bond a bit over something delightful.

Peter Drucker famously said that “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” implying that the culture of your company determines success no matter how effective your strategy may be. Well, I think Drucker knew what he was talking about, even if he wasn’t thinking about soft-serve ice cream or popcorn for breakfast.

As many companies start to head back to the office, away from the land of solo and remote work and into a transformed workplace, it will pay to keep Drucker’s advice in mind and search for easy and natural ways to nurture the whole person on your staff. How you create a culture speaks volumes about your values. This is why the Silicon Valley model of outfitting work spaces with lots of games and ping pong tables and bourbon bars and so on came to be justifiably ridiculed as a way to keep employees “on prem.” To the extent such practices reinforced a culture and set of values, these seemed predicated on high stress and workaholism rather than joyful productivity and sense of fulfillment and fellowship.

One bourbon, one scotch and one beer make good lyrics for blues singers, but in most of our work spaces you want something that pops or, as the Braves found out, something that makes your whole team scream for ice cream.