The previous articles in this series have established what culture is at the psychological level, how it forms through founder behaviour and social learning, and why it resists change once established. This article addresses the forward-facing question: given all of that, what does deliberate culture-building actually require in practice?

The three behaviours that build high-performing cultures

Coyle’s (2018) synthesis of research on high-performing teams across military, commercial, and creative contexts identified three consistent behaviours that distinguished cultures that performed at the highest level. The contribution of the research is not the identification of the categories — safety, vulnerability, and purpose are not new ideas — but the operational specificity: Coyle identified the specific micro-behaviours through which each is built, rather than simply asserting that they matter.

Building safety is not a policy decision; it is a continuous practice of belonging cues — the small signals that communicate to each person that they are included, that their presence is valued, and that the environment will not punish honesty. The specific micro-behaviours include making eye contact, using people’s names, asking questions that demonstrate genuine interest in what they think, and responding to uncertainty and error in ways that communicate curiosity rather than judgment. These are not dramatic leadership moments; they are the accumulated texture of thousands of small interactions.

Sharing vulnerability is not a single moment of dramatic honesty but the consistent modelling of willingness to acknowledge uncertainty, mistakes, and the limits of one’s own knowledge. The leader who says “I don’t know” when they do not know, who publicly names their own errors before anyone else does, and who genuinely asks for help rather than performing asking — this leader is providing the most powerful available signal that vulnerability is safe in this environment. Edmondson’s (1999) research confirmed that this specific behaviour is the primary predictor of team psychological safety — the enabling condition for the performance, learning, and information-sharing that effective cultures require.

Establishing purpose is not a mission statement revision; it is the continuous construction of narrative that connects the specific work each person does to a goal that matters beyond the commercial transaction. Coyle’s research identified the specific storytelling practices — the origin story, the regular articulation of why the work matters, the explicit naming of the values in action rather than in declaration — as the primary mechanism through which purpose becomes a shared cultural reality rather than a framed document.

Why system design is more powerful than declared values

Wood and Rünger’s (2016) habit research and Skinner’s (1938) operant conditioning framework together establish the most practically consequential insight for deliberate culture-building: the culture the organisation gets is the culture its reward system produces, not the culture its values statement declares.

The reward system encompasses everything that the organisation incentivises, tolerates, promotes, and punishes — including the things it does not realise it is rewarding. The manager who delivers results and treats people badly and is promoted despite that treatment has communicated more about the organisation’s actual values than any printed values card. The team member who raises a difficult problem and is subsequently marginalised has communicated more about the psychological safety level than any psychological safety workshop. The research thematic analysis confirmed accountability systems as the primary regulator of organisational behaviour — stronger than communication, stated values, or culture initiatives.

Deliberate culture-building therefore requires deliberate reward system design. What does promotion actually require here? What does the organisation do when high performance and poor values collide? What gets celebrated in public? What gets tolerated without comment? The answers to these questions are the actual culture, and they are what each new person joining the organisation observes and uses to calibrate what is expected and what is safe.

Why hiring is the most consequential and most underused culture lever

Schein’s (1985) founder embedding mechanisms identified hiring and selection as one of the primary channels through which culture is installed — because each person added brings their own assumptions, which either reinforce or erode the existing cultural pattern. In the first ten to fifteen hires, the founder is essentially choosing whether the culture their behaviour has established will be amplified or diluted.

Schneider’s (1987) Attraction-Selection-Attrition framework established that organisations naturally attract, select, and retain people whose assumptions fit the existing culture through an automatic self-selection mechanism. The deliberate culture-builder can harness this mechanism rather than simply inheriting its default: by designing the hiring process to make the actual cultural assumptions visible — through specific situational questions, through observable behaviour during the hiring process, through genuine assessment of how candidates respond to the organisation’s real norms rather than its stated values — the founder can make hiring a culture-compounding activity rather than a culture-diluting one.

The practical implication is that hiring for culture fit, done carefully, is not about finding people who are similar to the founder — it is about finding people whose assumptions align with the culture the organisation is trying to build. The person who genuinely believes that honest feedback improves outcomes, that collaboration produces better results than competition, and that mistakes are data will compound a culture built on those assumptions. The person who believes the opposite will erode it, regardless of their technical competence.

The small wins accumulation and the onboarding window

Weick’s (1984) small wins research established that culture is built more reliably through accumulated small consistent behaviours than through dramatic culture initiatives. The founder who makes one consistent change — who starts speaking last in every meeting, who publicly names their own error in every post-mortem, who asks one genuinely curious question in every one-on-one — is building culture through the accumulation of behavioural evidence that changes the descriptive norm one interaction at a time.

The onboarding window is the most documented high-leverage opportunity for deliberate culture installation. New hires are maximally receptive to cultural assumption formation in their first ninety days — the period during which they are actively observing and encoding what kind of place this is, what is expected of them, and what is safe. The organisation that uses this window deliberately — through structured introductions to the actual assumptions rather than the stated values, through early experiences that demonstrate the culture in action, and through explicit articulation of what the culture is and why — is installing assumptions at the moment of highest receptivity. The organisation that uses the onboarding window for administrative processing is leaving the assumption-formation to chance.

Books worth reading on this

Powerful by Patty McCord is the most directly applicable available account of deliberate culture-building from the perspective of someone who built one of the most studied corporate cultures in recent history. McCord’s specific account of how the Netflix culture was constructed — not through values workshops but through the deliberate design of hiring practices, performance management, and the honest articulation of what the organisation actually expected and valued — provides the most practically concrete available complement to the research framework this article describes.

If the dynamics described here are significantly affecting your wellbeing, speaking with a psychologist is the right next step. UK: Samaritans (116 123, free, 24/7). Mind (0300 123 3393). BACP: bacp.co.uk/search/Therapists. Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741 (US, UK, Canada, Ireland). International: internationaltherapistdirectory.com.

This article is for educational and informational purposes only. Sources: Coyle, D. (2018), The Culture Code, Bantam Books. Edmondson, A.C. (1999), Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams, Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. Wood, W. & Rünger, D. (2016), Psychology of Habit, Annual Review of Psychology, 67, 289–314. Skinner, B.F. (1938), The Behavior of Organisms, Appleton-Century-Crofts. Schein, E.H. (1985, 5th ed. 2017), Organizational Culture and Leadership, Jossey-Bass. Schneider, B. (1987), The People Make the Place, Personnel Psychology, 40(3), 437–453. Weick, K.E. (1984), Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems, American Psychologist, 39(1), 40–49. McCord, P. (2018), Powerful, Silicon Guild. Hastings, R. & Meyer, E. (2020), No Rules Rules, Penguin Press.