Remember the Titans and Building Trust Across Divisions
There is a scene in Remember the Titans that has always stuck with me. Coach Boone forces his players to learn something personal about a teammate from the other side of the racial divide before they can eat. It is awkward, uncomfortable, and nobody wants to do it. But it works. And it works because building trust across divisions never starts with agreement -- it starts with knowing the person sitting across from you.
If you lead in academic medicine, you know exactly what that kind of division feels like. Maybe not along racial lines, but across departments, disciplines, generations, and professional identities. The surgeon who does not trust the hospitalist's judgment. The senior faculty member who dismisses the early-career researcher's methods. The clinical team that barely speaks to the basic science department down the hall. These divides are real, and they quietly erode the kind of team unity that physician leadership demands.
Forced Proximity Is Not the Same as Integration
In the film, the school board merges two high school football teams and tells them to figure it out. Coach Boone understands that simply putting people in the same room will not make them a team. He has to create the conditions for real connection, even when his players would rather stay in their corners.
Academic medicine does this all the time. We merge departments, create interdisciplinary committees, and launch cross-functional task forces. Then we are surprised when people show up, sit with the colleagues they already know, and nothing changes. As Patrick Lencioni writes in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, "Trust is the foundation of real teamwork." Without it, every structural change is just rearranging chairs.
The lesson from the Titans is that structure alone does not produce trust. Someone has to do the harder work of making people actually engage with each other.
Trust Gets Built in the Small Moments
One of the most powerful dynamics in the film is the relationship between Gerry Bertier and Julius Campbell. They do not become allies because of a team meeting or a mission statement. They earn each other's respect through small, repeated acts -- calling each other out, showing up when it matters, and eventually choosing loyalty over comfort.
In my experience coaching faculty, trust across divisions follows the same pattern. It rarely comes from a retreat or a strategic planning session. It comes from the attending who picks up the phone instead of sending a passive-aggressive email. The department chair who gives credit to a colleague in another division during a dean's meeting. The physician-scientist who asks a clinician-educator for genuine input on a curriculum project rather than treating it as a checkbox.
These moments are small. They are also the only things that actually work.
The Leader Sets the Temperature
Coach Boone catches a lot of heat in the movie. Parents, assistant coaches, and community members all push back on his approach. But he holds the line because he knows that if the leaders fracture, the team fractures with them.
This is directly applicable to building trust across divisions in academic medicine. When a department chair trash-talks another department in front of faculty, that division calcifies. When a division chief rolls their eyes at a new initiative from leadership, permission to disengage spreads instantly. Research on organizational trust from the Center for Creative Leadership consistently shows that leader behavior is the single strongest predictor of whether teams develop trust or suspicion.
You do not have to like every decision that comes from the other side of the aisle. But if you are in a leadership role, your people are watching how you talk about colleagues in other departments, and they are taking notes.
You Cannot Skip the Uncomfortable Part
The Titans did not become a unified team because it was easy or because everyone suddenly agreed. They became a team because their leaders refused to let them stay divided and because individual players chose to do the uncomfortable work of getting to know someone different from themselves.
If you are trying to build a more cohesive culture across divisions in your department or institution, know that it will be messy. People will resist. There will be conversations that feel forced and awkward. That is not a sign that it is failing -- it is a sign that it is actually happening.
The alternative is a collection of talented individuals who happen to share a building but never become a team. And in academic medicine, that is a cost we cannot afford.
If you'd like to learn more, contact us to schedule a time to chat.
