Team Culture Isn't Found, It's Made
Culture.
We have all heard this term. “This team has a great culture.” “The culture in that organization is great.” But it keeps amazing me how nuanced the idea really is. So I filled my coffee cup and decided to give my take on it, as someone who has been building teams for the past few years (and deeply enjoyed the process).
Culture doesn’t exist until people act
The most important misconception about culture I have observed is the premise that culture exists as a thing in itself. It doesn’t. Culture is the result of the actions of individuals, and of those same individuals reacting to the actions of others.
Culture is whether you feel empowered to be yourself at work. It’s whether your perceived performance is tied to the merit of your achievements, or to the degree to which the boss happens to like you. Every conversation during a standup, every response to a colleague’s message and every good morning to the guy sitting next to your desk (or the avoidance of it) is a small vote for the culture you actually have, regardless of the one written on the wall.
Culture is the sum of the behaviors a team expresses, tolerates and rewards.
This is not a new idea. Ben Horowitz makes the same point in What You Do Is Who You Are: culture is not your values, it’s your actions. Netflix’s famous culture deck puts it more bluntly: the real values are shown by who gets hired, promoted, and let go.
Culture is a rare win-win opportunity
I see setting a good culture as one of the most overseen win-wins an organization can aim for. Most decisions involve a trade-off between what an individual and the organization or its leadership would want, or what “is good for business”. But this one largely doesn’t.
A good culture is better for both the individual and the organization:
- When someone is happy with their team’s culture, their satisfaction rises.
- Higher satisfaction lifts motivation, which makes them more effective and productive.
- A safe culture also empowers people to speak up. This results in risks flagged in time, ideas being shared and constructive disagreements yielding to better results.
That last point matters more than most leaders admit. Google’s Project Aristotle studied what made teams effective and found the top factor wasn’t talent or seniority. It was psychological safety, the shared belief that you won’t be punished for speaking up.
One of the things that surprises me most, whenever I see it or hear about it, is a leader who can’t rely on their team for expertise. The assumption that one person knows more than everyone else in their team about everything is, frankly, ridiculous. I suspect it’s usually rooted in insecurity, but that’s a topic for another day. The healthier instinct is the one good leaders share: hire people smarter than you, then actually listen to them.
So how do you set the right one?
Culture is important. Great. Now the hard part: how do you intentionally shape it?
As a starting point: the more influence you have in an organization, the bigger your impact in its culture. And that’s a responsibility not to take lightly. Here are four things that I noticed have the biggest impact in steering an organization’s culture:
1. Lead by example
If you don’t do it, why would anyone around you feel safe doing it? If you want people to take their holidays, be the one who very visibly closes the laptop for a week, then come back and tell them about the awesome cuba libres you sipped while watching the sunset in some tropical beach.
The same applies to admitting mistakes, asking “dumb” questions, and logging off on time.
2. Reward the behaviors you actually want
People read what gets rewarded far more accurately than what gets said. If you praise collaboration but only promote lone heroes, the team learns the real rule in a week.
This is the good old “actions speak louder than words.” Every incentive you set is a signal of what the team is really optimized for. When those signals contradict the stated values, people trust the signals.
Another point related to behaviors: how you measure success has to be handled with just as much care. The moment you tie a metric to success, people will naturally optimize for that metric, sometimes to the point where it stops measuring anything useful at all. This is known as Goodhart’s Law: “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
A recent example I saw across the tech industry was companies setting up leaderboards for AI token consumption. I understand the intent: they wanted a way to measure AI adoption. But the moment you rank people by how much they spend, some of them will find a way to run models on a loop just to climb the board. The metric goes up, the actual outcome gets worse, and you’d have been better off not measuring it at all.
3. Make it safe to be wrong
Treat mistakes as information, not as crimes. The first time someone is punished for an honest, well-intentioned error, everyone else quietly decides to stop taking risks.
This stifles innovation and slows learning: people hide problems instead of surfacing them, bad news travels late, and the team optimizes for looking safe rather than being right. The teams that improve fastest are the ones that can say “that didn’t work” out loud, without anyone reaching for blame.
4. Be transparent with context
Share the why behind decisions, not just the what. Context lets people make good calls on their own, control just teaches them to wait for instructions and strips away their sense of ownership and agency.
In my experience this matters even more with younger generations, who tend to be more skeptical of authority for its own sake. There’s also a real opportunity here: giving fresh grads genuine context is one of the fastest ways to make them feel a sense of belonging, though that deserves an article of its own.
The lack of context and transparency in decision making is one of the bigger contradictions I see in the business world. Companies pride themselves on rigorous recruiting processes, hire sharp and capable people, and then turn around and refuse to treat those same people like adults. If you trusted them enough to hire them, trust them enough to give them the full picture.
Closing thought
Culture isn’t a few bullet points on a slide, a poster in the hallway, or a value statement nobody can recite. It’s the result of a thousand small actions, and regardless of your role or position, you play an active part in shaping the culture of every organization and group you belong to.
In the end, building a great culture is one of the most rewarding things you can do on two important fronts: the personal, because it’s genuinely fulfilling to help people do their best work, and the organizational, because a team that trusts each other simply performs better. It’s the rare effort where doing right by people and doing right by the business point in exactly the same direction.