Want to Shift Culture? Start with the Team.

In fast-paced, high-accountability environments, teams are often evaluated by their outputs: Did they deliver on time? Did they hit their KPIs? But beneath every sprint demo, quarterly benchmark and roadmap milestone lies a more important and often ignored question: How did the team work together to get there?

A Sidebar

In a previous chapter of my career, I worked at Gigster, where we developed an early model of continuous team calibration, which we internally code-named Karma. Our new benchmark captured more than standard delivery metrics — it surfaced real-time signals like satisfaction in the work, confidence about each other, and general state of happiness and engagement. We found that these indicators correlated strongly with project risk.

• How confident are team members in one another right now?

• How satisfied are we with how we worked this sprint?

• What friction points are we ignoring?

We built on the belief that culture is shaped by behavior, and that effective teams pay attention to how they work—not just what they ship. Looking back, I now see that work as a precursor to working with a team coach: a way of making the invisible visible, so teams can build a practice and a method of learning and growing together.

When Teams Act Like Systems

Every team has an "operating system" — a set of norms, behaviors, assumptions, and agreements that influence how work gets done. And that system is affected by every change in the org. This dynamic is well captured by the Tuckman model of group development: forming, storming, norming, and performing. Every time there’s a pivot, a reorg, the addition of even one new member, or attrition, the team’s behavior is affected and needs active recalibration. Most teams move through this cycle more than once.

Some teams move through these transitions with awareness; others get stuck in storming without naming it. This is when a coach can help. Now, a coach isn’t there forever. Their role is to help the team build self-sustaining dynamics. In many cases, the most impactful coaching happens over a defined arc: helping the team reset, realign, and reestablish healthy dynamics after a key shift or disruption.

Back when I led teams, we used standard team practices around retrospectives. Each team would meet at regular intervals to evaluate what worked, what didn’t, and what could be improved in our product delivery process. It was a lightweight but powerful habit that made space for learning. This kind of cadence is familiar in product development—and my work with teams borrows from that playbook. But instead of focusing on feature velocity or defect rates, it invites teams to reflect on their ways of working, their cohesion, and how they show up for each other.

Designing the Team’s Internal Workflows

Designing team workflows isn’t a one-size-fits-all playbook. It’s a process of discovery and co-creation. Some practices that often emerge through using an outside team coach:

• Defining norms: Making implicit expectations explicit. How do we make decisions? Give feedback? Handle disagreement?

• Establishing reflective routines: Creating regular spaces for the team to pause, look back, and adjust.

• Balancing voices: Helping quieter team members find their voice, and louder ones make room.

• Aligning on purpose: Revisiting why the team exists and how each member contributes.

  
  

Each of these practices helps shorten the time it takes for teams to move through forming, storming, norming, and into high-performing states. More importantly, they help teams do so authentically, in ways that fit their context. High-performing teams tend to develop their own ways of working—grounded in shared awareness, feedback, and trust—rather than relying on borrowed playbooks.

Culture, at its core, is shaped by what people actually do when they work together—not by what's written down. Coaching makes that visible, influenceable, and sustainable.

Final Thought

In the end, every team is different. But the best teams share one thing in common: they pay attention to how they work together, not just what they do. Bringing in an outside collaborator helps teams do exactly that. And like any good system intervention, this kind of collaboration works best when it empowers the team to carry forward what they’ve learned—without ongoing dependency.

As I move more deeply into this space, I’m excited to continue building and refining team coaching approaches—ones that help teams accelerate trust, establish meaningful norms, and grow their own unique culture.

What might shift if your team had some help—just for a time?

Teams: Working together better