Culture Isn't Something You Announce
Andrew Devlin · April 10, 2026 · 9 min read
Ask ten CEOs to describe their company culture and you'll get ten confident answers and zero useful information.
"We're collaborative." "We're high-performance." "We're a family." That last one should come with a warning label — families are complicated, underfunded, and surprisingly resistant to performance improvement plans.
Here's what I've noticed: the leaders who talk most about culture are often the ones who have done the least to build it. They've declared it. Printed it on the wall. Made it a value in the employee handbook. Then they wait for it to arrive — like a piece of furniture they ordered but never assembled.
Culture doesn't arrive. It accumulates. And the way it accumulates is the thing nobody tells you when you're scaling a sales team.
You Can't Install Culture. You Can Engineer It.
Edgar Schein spent decades studying how organisations develop culture, and his core finding is deceptively simple: culture is built at the assumption level, shaped by experience — not by decree.
The chain runs like this: Experiences shape Beliefs. Beliefs drive Behaviours. Behaviours, repeated across a team over time, become Culture.
Which means if you want a different culture, you don't start with culture. You start upstream — with the experiences your team is having. A deal won in a way nobody expected. A loss studied rather than shrugged off. A conversation that changes what someone believes is possible. These are the raw materials. The leader's actual job isn't culture declaration. It's experience design.
I saw this clearly during an engagement with a sales team in Brisbane earlier this year. The GM of Sales said something in a session that's stayed with me: "You can share experiences. You can't share beliefs." You can put people in a room with the same information and walk out with five different convictions. But you can put people through the same experience — and that changes something at the assumption level that a slide deck never will.
A word of credit: much of what I'm going to describe in this post took shape in collaboration with the CEO and GM of Sales of that Brisbane business. These ideas didn't come from a textbook — they came from two leaders who genuinely wanted to build something different. I'm borrowing their thinking with their fingerprints still on it.
The Question Nobody Asks
Most people ask: "What's the culture like here?" That question puts culture in the company's hands — something the organisation gives you, like a benefits package or a parking spot.
The more useful question is: "What am I adding to this culture?" And that question has an uncomfortable implication: there is no neutral.
Every person on a sales team is either a culture contributor or a culture consumer. Contributors deposit. They bring wins and losses to the team. They share pipeline intelligence instead of hoarding it. They own outcomes — whether the deal closes or not. Consumers draw from the account. They work hard — often genuinely hard — but the net effect of their presence is subtraction. They ask what the culture gives them before they ask what they give it.
The thing that makes this uncomfortable is that most consumers don't know they're doing it. They're not lazy. They're not selfish. They've just never been asked the question. Which is why the job of building culture starts, more than most leaders realise, in the hiring process — and gets reinforced every single day after that.
When I used to interview sales candidates, I'd occasionally get the question: "What's the culture like here?" My answer was direct: "You'll help decide. There's no neutral." Some candidates loved that answer. Others went quiet. Both were useful data points.
Identity Beats Goals Every Time
James Clear makes a distinction in Atomic Habits that reframes everything about team building. Goals tell you where you want to go. Identity decides whether you get there.
A goals-based team says: "We want to improve our close rate this quarter." An identity-based team says: "We are a team that doesn't accept losses we could have fought." The difference isn't motivational. It's structural. Goals-based thinking erodes under pressure — when the target feels distant, or when the quarter goes sideways, the motivation dissolves. Identity survives setbacks, because a setback isn't just a miss. It's a statement: that's not who we are.
This reframe has direct implications for how you build a sales team — from the moment you write the job description to the moment you run a deal review. You're not hiring people to hit a number. You're hiring people to vote, with every single behaviour, for the team's identity. A rep who accepts a lost deal without going back to fight for it has cast a vote. A rep who pushes a close date without updating the forecast has cast a vote. A rep who shares a competitor insight with the team instead of keeping it private has cast a vote.
Every action is a vote. The culture is the tally.
The X's and O's Problem
I ran a session earlier this year where I started by asking a room of salespeople to play noughts and crosses. Yes, noughts and crosses. I told them to find a partner, play as many games as possible in four minutes, and track how many they personally won.
Most of them played competitively. Blocking, countering, grinding out draws. Smart people, working hard, producing a lot of stalemates.
One or two pairs figured out that if they cooperated — each letting the other win alternately — they could play a complete game every fifteen seconds. Their combined score was three to four times higher than any competitive pair in the room.
This is Nash Equilibrium in a game that fits on a napkin. In a competitive zero-sum approach, both players blocking produces fewer total wins for everyone. The moment you reframe from "how do I win" to "how do we both win more" — the total outcome changes dramatically. Robert Axelrod's research on game theory found the same pattern at scale: in repeated interactions, cooperative strategies consistently outperform competitive ones over time.
In sales, the equivalent is pipeline intelligence. The rep who protects their deal flow from the team — keeps their competitive insights private, runs their territory as a solo operation — is playing the blocking version of noughts and crosses. They might win some games. The team wins fewer. Everyone leaves points on the table.
Team before self isn't a value statement. It's a strategy. And it has to be built into how you onboard, how you run deal reviews, and what behaviours you recognise and reward — from day one.
The Standard You Walk Past
General David Morrison, former Australian Army Chief of Army, said it best: "The standard you walk past is the standard you accept."
It's one of the most useful lines in leadership, and it applies to sales teams with uncomfortable precision. Every time a blame statement goes unchallenged in a standup — "procurement blocked it," "the customer changed their mind," "the dollar moved" — the team just normalised it. Every time a close date slips a second time with no conversation about what's actually in the way, the team just normalised that too. Every time a loss gets accepted without asking whether it was actually fought for, the standard shifts a little lower.
Nobody made a decision to lower the standard. They just walked past the moment.
The accountability version of each of these isn't self-flagellation. It's the question that changes something: "What could we have controlled? What do we do differently next time?" Accountability is how identity-based teams respond to a miss. Blame is how goal-based teams do. The difference is whether the team believes their behaviours actually connect to outcomes — or whether outcomes are mostly external.
Building this into your culture means naming it when it happens. Kindly. Directly. Not after the meeting, in a private conversation that nobody else hears. In the room, in the moment. That's the job — for the sales leader, and eventually for every senior rep on the team.
What This Means in Practice
Everything above is philosophy until you attach it to a system. Here's what it looks like across the stages where culture is actually built or broken.
Recruiting. You're not screening for skills alone. You're screening for contributors. The tell isn't in the answer to "tell me about a deal you lost." It's in whether the candidate owns any part of it — or whether every loss was external. Identity-based hiring filters for people who vote the right way before you've told them what the identity is.
Onboarding. The first thirty days are the most culturally formative period an employee will have. Most companies spend them on product training and CRM setup. The identity of the team should be explicit on day one — not as a poster on the wall, but as a direct conversation: here's who we are, here's what that looks like in practice, and here's where you'll see it every week. The first experience a new rep has of the team sets a belief. Make it a deliberate one.
Enablement and coaching. The deal review is one of the most underused culture-building tools in sales. Done well, it's not a forecast update — it's an experience. What did we learn? What do we do differently? What does this tell us about what's possible? Repeated across a team, those conversations shape belief faster than any training programme.
The 1% principle. Dave Brailsford took over British Cycling in 2003. At that point, the team had gone 110 years without winning the Tour de France. A European bike manufacturer refused to sell them equipment because they were worried association with the British team would hurt sales. Brailsford's strategy wasn't transformation. It was aggregation — improve every element of cycling by one percent. The critical point, and the one that gets lost in how this story is usually told, is that Brailsford didn't do the improving. The team did. Every rider, every coach, every support staff member was asked to find their own one percent — in nutrition, in recovery, in sleep quality, in preparation, in the margins nobody had ever thought to look at before. Hand-washing technique. Pillow selection. The colour of the truck's interior walls. Individual accountability for individual improvement, multiplied across an entire organisation. Brailsford predicted they'd win the Tour de France in five years. They won it in three. Over the following decade, British cyclists collected 178 world championships, 66 Olympic gold medals, and five Tour de France titles — widely regarded as the most successful run in the history of the sport.
1.01 to the power of 365 equals 37. One percent better, every day, for a year. But only if everyone shows up for their one percent. One person doing it is a habit. A whole team doing it is a culture.
The cultural application: teams don't transform in off-sites. They improve in increments — one rep who starts sharing pipeline intelligence, one deal review where someone names the miss instead of explaining it away, one leader who doesn't walk past the moment. Those are the 1% deposits. The culture is the compound interest.
The Belief You're Building Toward
I want to close with the idea that sat at the centre of that Brisbane session — the one the CEO articulated and the GM of Sales is now building into how his team operates every week.
It isn't complicated: if we believe we are winners, and we act like winners, we will win.
Not sometimes. Not when conditions are right. Systematically. Because belief shapes behaviour, behaviour shapes outcome, and outcome reinforces belief. The loop runs in both directions — upward and downward — and the leader's job is to keep it spinning the right way. Through the experiences they engineer. The moments they don't walk past. The identity they protect, every day, in every conversation, with every hire.
Culture isn't something your company gives you. It's something your team builds together — one behaviour at a time.
The only question is whether you're depositing or drawing.
Research & Sources
| Source | Finding Used | Reference |
|---|---|---|
| Edgar Schein (1985) | Culture is built at the assumption level through shared experiences — it cannot be installed by decree | Organisational Culture and Leadership, Jossey-Bass |
| James Clear (2018) | Identity-based habits outlast goal-based thinking because they survive setbacks — every action is a vote for the type of person you wish to become | Atomic Habits, Penguin Random House |
| Nash (1950) / Axelrod (1984) | In repeated interactions, cooperative strategies consistently outperform competitive ones — the foundation of the team-before-self argument | Nash, Non-Cooperative Games (1950); Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (1984) |
| General David Morrison | "The standard you walk past is the standard you accept" — on cultural maintenance and accountability | Address to Australian Army, 2013 |
| Dave Brailsford / James Clear | Aggregation of marginal gains — 110 years without a Tour de France win; won it in three years after Brailsford implemented 1% improvement across every element; 178 world championships and 66 Olympic golds over the following decade | Brailsford interview, Harvard Business Review (2015); Clear, Atomic Habits (2018) |
| Gallup (2023) | Engaged teams are 21% more profitable than disengaged ones | Gallup, State of the Global Workplace, 2023 |
Andrew Devlin is the founder of ScaleTech CRO Ltd., a fractional VP of Sales practice helping B2B technology companies build the sales infrastructure they need to scale. He works with CEOs and revenue leaders across North America.
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