He showed them a documentary before game tape
The Spurs had just lost the night before. Gregg Popovich walked into the video room and turned on a CNN film about the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
The team gathered expecting to review film from the previous night's loss to Oklahoma City. Popovich dimmed the lights and played a CNN documentary about the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma marches and the Voting Rights Act. When it ended, he asked questions: What did you think? What would you have done in that situation?
Daniel Coyle, who spent months inside the Spurs' facility researching The Culture Code, saw this kind of thing happen regularly. Popovich circulated historical newspaper articles on the team plane. He organized dinners at which nobody talked about basketball. He learned enough about each player's home country -- the Spurs have included players from more than a dozen nations -- to ask specific, genuinely curious questions.
None of this looked like a team-building exercise. It was something quieter and more durable: belonging cues. Coyle borrowed the phrase from social science. Belonging cues are brief signals that say: you matter to this group, this group has shared standards, and I believe you can meet them. They work because the brain evaluates belonging below conscious attention, scanning constantly for signals about whether a given environment is safe enough to give full effort.
Assistant coach Chip Engelland put it simply: Pop delivers two things over and over -- he tells you the truth with no nonsense, and then he loves you to death.
The Spurs won five championships and twenty consecutive winning seasons. Popovich had built a team where being seen, being held to standards, and being cared for happened inside the same culture.