Hi Reader,

A few years into my nonprofit career, I was leading a team I was proud of. Smart people. Big hearts. Strong work. And every time someone asked me to describe the team’s culture, I’d say something like, “We’re really collaborative. We lean on each other.”

Then one afternoon, a team member I’ll call Priya asked if she could talk to me for ten minutes.

She told me she’d stopped bothering to coordinate with the other departments on her projects. Not because she didn’t want to. Because it didn’t seem to matter.

I asked her to say more.

She said, “When Marcus jumped in and smoothed things over with that funder after the site visit went sideways, you called him a lifesaver in the team meeting. When I spent three weeks last month getting four departments to agree on a shared referral process so we'd stop losing families between programs, nobody mentioned it. I’m not trying to be petty. I’m just noticing what gets noticed.”

I sat with that for a long time.

Because what I said we valued was collaboration. But what I actually rewarded (in the small, daily, public moments that shape what a team learns matters) was individual heroics.

Priya wasn’t wrong. She was just the only one who told me.

There’s a framework I use in leadership work, from a scholar named Edgar Schein, that helped me understand what happened. He called it the three levels of organizational culture:

Level 1. Artifacts — what you see. The visible, surface layer. How meetings run. How people dress. What the office feels like when you walk in. How Slack sounds. What gets celebrated in the newsletter.

Level 2. Espoused values — what you say. The mission statement. The values poster. The “we believe in collaboration” line you repeat in team meetings. The language of the culture you’re trying to build.

Level 3. Underlying assumptions — what you actually reward, tolerate, and protect. This is the bottom layer, and it’s the one that shapes behavior. Not what you say. Not what you see on the surface. It's what people learn by watching that actually matters around here: who gets praised, who gets promoted, who gets protected, and who gets quietly punished.

When levels 2 and 3 don’t match, level 3 wins. Every time. Your team doesn’t act on the words; they act on the patterns.

Here’s what I most want you to hear today: you have more power over level 3 than you think.

A lot of mid-level leaders will read the word “culture” and think that’s the CEO’s job. Or that's the VP of People and Culture's job. It’s not any single person's job. The org has a culture. Your team has a culture. And your team’s culture is shaped almost entirely by what you, personally, reward in the small moments.

What you call out in a team meeting. What you write in a performance review. What you protect in a 1:1. Who you defend when something goes wrong. What you let slide. What you celebrate publicly versus what you thank privately.

None of that requires permission from above. All of it is yours.

So here are three questions I’d ask you to sit with this week. They’re the questions I sat with after my conversation with Priya:

First: What do I say we value? Write down the three or four things you’d name if someone asked you tomorrow.

Second: What do I actually reward? Look at the last four weeks. Whose work did you publicly praise? What kind of effort? What kind of outcome? What pattern is your team learning from what you noticed?

Third: Where is the gap, and which reward am I willing to change? Don’t try to fix everything. Pick one. One kind of behavior you say you value that you’re going to start noticing out loud. One kind of effort you’re going to make visible in the next team meeting.

That’s it. Not an overhaul. Not a culture initiative. One thing you decide to notice, out loud, this week.

Because the thing I learned from Priya is that culture doesn’t shift when you change what you say. It shifts when you change what you notice.

Noticing differently this week,
Sheila

P.S. I turned the three levels and the diagnostic questions that go with them into a one-page Team Culture Diagnostic you can use before your next team meeting. Grab it here (it’s free).