The Importance of Team Culture Alignment

Every team has a culture, whether you define it intentionally or let it form on its own. It can be magical when a team has aligned on culture from top to bottom. Execution gets easier. Trust grows. People actually enjoy the work. When it doesn’t? Trust is lost, people don’t feel valued, and everything feels harder than it should.

Culture is not a happy accident. It’s a set of choices. And those choices start with the leader.

What Team Culture Is—and Is Not

Culture is simply how things really get done here. It’s what is valued, encouraged, and incentivized. It’s not how the onboarding slides describe it. Not how leadership wants it to be perceived. How it actually works day to day.

In tech, most cultural tension shows up in a few familiar places:

• Do we move fast and fix things later, or do we slow down to get it right the first time? Most importantly how do we know when to speed up and when to slow down?

• Do engineers choose their own tools, or do we optimize for consistency and coordination?

• Do we cascade information from leadership broadly, or is it strictly on a need-to-know basis?

• Is the team encouraged to gain and share knowledge? Is there time and space to do so?

• Do we treat failed experiments as learning—or as career-limiting mistakes?

Every team must choose where they stand on these issues and their own values. While a team charter, mission, vision, and values are important, it’s what happens day to day that matters.

Culture isn’t what’s on the wall.

It’s what gets rewarded.

It’s what gets someone promoted.

It’s what makes someone quit.

1. The Leader Has to Put a Stake in the Ground

If you’re the senior-most leader, you don’t get to “feel out the team culture.” You define it. Clearly. Explicitly.

That means thoughtfully creating a team charter, a mission, a vision, and values that actually tell people how to behave when things get hard. These artifacts matter because they give the team something solid to align to. They tell people what’s important and what isn’t.

The tradeoffs above can help you define what is important.

You don’t need to write all of these documents, but creating them will help you challenge your assumptions and put what’s most important down on paper. It’ll force you to invite the tradeoffs to understand where you stand.

• Team Charter - This is a longer document 2-5 pages long. That includes the mission, vision, values, as well as what success looks like, how you’ll know when you’re successful or improving, and the metrics that will help drive you there.
• Mission - What we want to do, in our ideal way of working. Veracode has a good, concise mission: “Empower you to build, buy, and run secure software.”
• Vision - What does the world look like when you’ve accomplished your Mission? “A world free from software vulnerabilities” or “Developers can create secure software the first time using the tools they choose at the velocity they want”
• Values - Spending time on set of 4-8 values is a great investment. These can be prescriptive or aspirational, and should be bold. Your team can use these to understand how they should proceed, using this list as a tiebreaker for the hardest decisions. Amazon does this well in two ways, through their famous Leadership Principles, and Tenets (example: The Principal Engineer Tenets), which are defined by each team at every level at the company.

Without that clarity, people invent their own answers—and those answers usually don’t match.

Writing these down is important, but if they collect dust, they’re worthless.

2. Alignment Needs to Happen Early

Once the leader defines the culture, the team needs to align to it. Quickly. Not forcefully, but clearly.

Misaligned values don’t magically drift toward the leader’s vision. They calcify. They turn into long-term friction that eventually becomes unfixable.

If someone can’t, or won’t, align, you have to address it directly. With respect. With empathy. But decisively. Not because they’re bad at their job, but because culture misalignment is one of the most corrosive forces on a team. Clearly defining expectations and helping your team find a better fit can be difficult, but it will pay dividends in the long run.

The longer you let it sit, the more it spreads. I like the book Adaptive Leadership to help explore these ideas.

3. Team Members Have To Actually Engage With the Culture

Alignment isn’t nodding along. It’s understanding the culture well enough to push back when something seems off.

One of the healthiest things someone can say to a leader is:

“[This behavior] is having [this impact] — was that intentional?”

Sometimes a leader is sending a cultural signal they don’t mean to. Sometimes they’re just acting out of habit. Sometimes they need to hear how something landed so they can adjust.

This is how good teams make each other better.

The Role of Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is the invisible scaffolding that lets culture work as intended. You can define any cultural value you want: experimentation, transparency, collaboration, but without psychological safety, none of it will stick.

Without psychological safety:

• Experiments stop because failures aren’t safe to admit.
• Transparency turns into silence because speaking up carries risk.
• Collaboration becomes conformity because dissent gets punished, often subtly.

You end up with a shadow culture that’s the exact opposite of what leadership claims to value.

This dynamic hits even harder in security teams. The difference between immediate incident reporting and “I hope this goes away before anyone notices” is psychological safety. The difference between pushing back on an unrealistic deadline and quietly shipping vulnerable code is psychological safety.

It’s not about everyone being comfortable. It’s about removing fear. Teams with real psychological safety have arguments. They disagree passionately. They hold each other to high standards.

But they can do all of that without humiliation, retaliation, or political fallout.

When psychological safety and high standards coexist, you get a team that learns fast, ships smart, and surfaces problems early. Without it, culture becomes a performance instead of a reality.

4. Every Person Has To Decide if They Can Thrive

Once the culture is clear and consistent, each person has to decide whether they can thrive in it.

Do the team’s values resonate with yours?

Do they energize you or drain you?

Can you be at your best in this environment?

If the answer is no, you have to be honest about that. Staying in a culture that misaligns with your values is a fast track to burnout, resentment, and quiet sabotage—even if unintentional.

5. When You’re Out of Alignment, You Have Three Choices

Every person has the same three options when misalignment becomes real:

1. Respectfully try to change the things you believe are important.
2. Accept the tradeoffs and commit to the direction.
3. Leave the team (or the company).

That’s it. Those are the choices.

Staying in a space where you fundamentally disagree with the culture—and hoping it magically changes—is the worst option. It hurts you and the team.

6. Don’t Make Rash Decisions; Give the Leader Time to Land

When a new leader arrives, give them room to breathe. Early days are disorienting for everyone. Decisions might look inconsistent or overly reactive because they’re still navigating inherited systems and learning the team.

A leader’s first 90 days can look completely different from their leadership style at the six-month mark.

Let them settle. Let patterns emerge. Give them the benefit of curiosity before jumping to judgment.

But once the patterns are clear, it’s time to decide where you stand.

Team culture isn’t an abstract idea; it’s the set of real behaviors a leader chooses and a team reinforces every day. Strong teams work when the leader clearly defines the culture, the team aligns quickly, and psychological safety allows people to speak up, push back, and learn without fear. When misalignment happens it can be toxic to the team. New leaders deserve time to find their footing, but once their true operating rhythm emerges, everyone has to decide whether they can thrive in that environment.