A job is never “just a job.”
You spend roughly half your waking hours there each week, so it’s pretty important to think beyond the job itself.
There’s one aspect of work that isn’t always talked about, but is just as important as other variables like salary, benefits, and extra perks.
It will not only impact your performance; it will play a role in the entire trajectory of your career.
I’m talking about team culture.
Culture does more than create a certain vibe. Team culture affects company success, personal growth, and (critically) the overall well-being of its workers.
This article will walk you through what good team environments tend to have in common and how to spot them before you take a new job.
Positive team culture? Check.
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Green flags that point to a good team culture
I used to roll my eyes at concepts like core values and emotional intelligence in leadership until I realized that they’re the backbone of cooperation and performance. Here are three characteristics that consistently show up among great teams.
1. They have established values
When core values are instilled, team members have a clear idea of what’s expected of them, and they tend to rise up to those expectations.
I’m reminded of a book called “Wooden on Leadership” by John Wooden. He talks about the principles he practiced to get the most from the teams he coached over the years. This includes the UCLA men’s basketball team that won an NCAA record of 88 consecutive wins.
He wanted the players and coaches on his staff to embody a specific set of character traits, so they could lean on those principles in any situation and know what to do without being explicitly told.
For example, one of those traits was poise. Poise meant remaining true to your game and what you know how to do instead of getting rattled under pressure.
Because poise was a value, the team knew to keep running the offense no matter how many points they were down.
When you’re looking to join a company, it’s a good idea to ask about their core values during the Q&A portion of the interview. You should always evaluate them just as much as they evaluate you.
Often, things like team culture and leadership are ignored because they don’t seem to correlate to ROI—except they do.
Without established values, time is wasted on miscommunication between leaders and their teams, deadlines get missed, and avoidable errors occur—all of which cost the company time and money. Employee turnover adds up too, and hiring and training new team members costs far more than retaining the ones you have.
Take time to consider your core values so you know whether the company and its team culture align with what’s most important to you.
Let’s say one of your core values is autonomy. You want to be trusted to do the work without being micromanaged. Even if the team culture isn’t micromanagement, per se, but still has a level of oversight that feels like overkill, you’ll end up misaligned.
Alignment is just as important as salary because misalignment can lead to burnout.
Burnout usually happens when all of the little micro-moments of poor team culture start to stack up—the 87th pointless meeting with no clear next step. Or the 46th passive-aggressive CC email because there’s no real communication going on.
There’s one team characteristic that usually catches those problems long before they snowball into burnout, and we’re about to get into it.
2. They offer psychological safety
Google, being Google, was looking for another way to remain one of the top companies in the world, so they ran internal research not just on the entire organization, but on the teams inside it.
They called it Project Aristotle. Starting in 2012, they spent two years analyzing 180 different teams inside the company—115 project teams in engineering and 65 pods in sales—across 250 different variables, so they could understand what makes a high-performing team.
Here are some of the things that didn’t make the final cut when it came to team effectiveness:
- Team size
- How extroverted the team members were
- The individual performance of the team members
- Seniority and tenure
- Whether teammates sat together in the same office
- Whether decisions were made by consensus
Individual talent wasn’t the key.
Google went in expecting the recipe to be great engineers plus an experienced manager plus resources.
It turned out that who was on the team mattered far less than how the team worked together.
One of the most important factors?
Psychological safety.
That’s the idea that team members can express themselves honestly, ask questions, make suggestions, and provide input without fear of judgment or reprimand.
Four other factors made the list as well: structure and clarity, dependability, meaningful work, and impact. All four matter, but they tend to follow from psychological safety, not the other way around. Teams don’t get clear on expectations or honest about what’s meaningful until people feel safe enough to say what they actually think.
The term psychological safety comes from Amy Edmondson, a Harvard Business School researcher who studied 51 teams inside one manufacturing company back in 1999. She found psychological safety varied a LOT, even within the same company. Despite the same policies and resources, there were wildly different team dynamics.
The biggest driver was coaching from the team lead, backed by the organization above them. The leaders of the highest-safety teams created the conditions for people to speak up.
So, what does it say when an academic study from 1999 and Google’s internal research nearly two decades later point to the same conclusion?
Psychological safety, and the leadership that creates it, is one of the clearest predictors of whether a team is worth joining.
But this goes deeper than your well-being and career satisfaction. Think about the implications of your work environment for your career as a whole.
3. They contribute to your success
Sam Darnold is the quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks, last year’s Super Bowl champion. He not only led his team to a championship, but also had one of his best seasons statistically as a QB.
Just a few years back, Sam was considered a bust.
He was drafted number one overall by the New York Jets, the organization where most quarterback careers go to die. If the best teams provide structure and clarity, the Jets were the exact opposite—chaos, disorganization, and ambiguity.
He performed poorly.
He developed a reputation for being the type of player who couldn’t perform well under pressure, including one game where he threw so many interceptions and got sacked so many times that the announcers said that he was “seeing ghosts.”
This stigma stuck with him for a while, and he bounced around between several organizations until he landed with the Minnesota Vikings, who had a better team culture and a coach known for mentoring QBs and helping them develop into better players.
He did well with the Vikings and had a near-MVP-caliber season.
The Vikings, perhaps unsure whether he really turned a corner or just had a good year, let him go.
He signed with the Seahawks and won the Super Bowl, including clutch playoff performances.
In another example, Archie Manning, former NFL QB and father of the two-time Super Bowl championship QB Eli Manning, infamously said that he wouldn’t let his son play for the San Diego Chargers if they drafted him. He essentially forced his son to get drafted by an organization with a great team culture because he knew the consequences of a bad one after playing for the Saints (one of the most abysmal franchises in the NFL at the time).
Two sports anecdotes aren’t a controlled study—Darnold could’ve simply needed more seasoning, and Eli Manning had the talent to succeed almost anywhere he landed. But the pattern isn’t limited to football.
Gallup’s analysis of more than 27 million employees found that managers alone account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement—and engagement is what predicts performance, retention, and how much people actually grow in a role.
Imagine you work for a team where you don’t feel psychologically safe to ask questions, you aren’t given feedback, there’s no structure and clarity to your work, and there are no values to fall back on.
Now, after working at this company with a poor team culture, your growth is stunted. You carry along subconscious negative patterns into your new roles, and it shifts the trajectory of your career in the wrong direction—just like a QB who gets drafted to the wrong organization.
I’ve heard as much listening to sales calls between my career coaching clients and job seekers.
A lot of them do feel stunted because they were in a toxic work environment.
They do feel behind because their teams didn’t foster skill development.
They’re seen as less capable in the market because the projects they worked on didn’t have a huge impact and weren’t meaningful.
They carry this attitude, along with their understandable insecurities, into their next roles—that is, if they’re confident enough to successfully sell themselves in the interview. Sometimes these barriers can even cost them a job that does have a good culture.
See how this loop works?
Yes, salary, benefits, and perks are important.
Yes, you also need to be able to make a living, and so it’s not like you have the option to be super picky in this market, but the long-term implications of the team you choose DO matter, so don’t sleep on it.
The question is…how do you assess the team culture when you’re on the outside? Before you actually accept a job offer? You don’t have a crystal ball…so what do you do?
This isn’t information you’ll be able to get from a recruiter who’s trying to place multiple positions across multiple teams. While you can’t ever fully know, you CAN do your best to make an informed decision.
Want a sneak peak into a team’s culture? Ask good questions
Usually, the hiring manager will be the manager running the team. If there are other members of leadership at the interview, you can get a good proxy for what it’s like to be a member of the team.
Companies do behavioral interviews to see how you actually apply your stated values in real situations. You can do the same thing to them and this will help you uncover valuable intel.
First, do they seem receptive or defensive when you bring up respectfully crafted but pointed questions about their team culture?
If they’re a healthy team, they’ll light up, because you’re already acting like a proactive team member. And it’ll be refreshing, since most candidates don’t ask these types of questions at all.
You’ll need to go deeper than questions that can be easily answered, like “what’s the culture here?” which often leads to empty buzzwords as a response.
Probe for scenarios, just like they do for you. That way, you’ll get a real answer that isn’t rehearsed.
Here are 6 questions that will give you insight into what the team is really like:
“Can you describe the company’s values? How do they show up in the day-to-day workplace?”
Does the answer sound vague or thoughtful? When they point to a specific scenario, imagine yourself as a team member in that situation and how it would make you feel.
Does the application of the value (not just the stated value) match YOUR internal core values?
“What do you see as the company’s and the team’s biggest challenges?”
A question like this reveals how open and honest they are because every team has challenges. Notice whether or not they address how they plan to solve those specific challenges, too. A good answer = the challenges themselves + the plans made to tackle them.
“In the last six months, how have you asked for feedback from your team ? Have you taken action on their input?”
This is a good way to assess psychological safety. It shows whether they are actively creating an environment where people can freely express themselves, ask questions, disagree, and have a say.
Your work will feel more meaningful and impactful when you’re involved in the process instead of just taking orders. This question reveals whether the team strives to improve structure and clarity (with the goal of ultimately improving performance).
“What should I know about this role that’s not in the job description?”
Job descriptions are shallow approximations of what the job actually entails, and half the time they are stuffed with buzzwords that don’t really mean anything (especially in corporate).
How well can they articulate the answer? Does it seem well-thought-out and do they have clear expectations of how you can perform well in the role?
“What happened to the last person who held this job?” with the follow-up, “How many people have held it in the last five years?”
This question is…direct.
Use it sparingly if you feel it’s necessary and you feel comfortable asking. It’ll only work for managers with a long history on a team that has existed for a while.
Also, keep in mind that turnover isn’t the perfect proxy for team culture because people job-hop. However, the answers can be telling, as well as their willingness or reluctance to answer them.
Related: Coded Language at Work: What Your Boss, Colleagues, and Hiring Managers Really MeanPro tip: Across all five, pay as much attention to how they answer as what they actually say. Tone, facial expressions, body language. Remember, you’re interviewing the interviewer.
“Would you take this job again, knowing what you know now?”
Ask this one outside the interview room. Track down someone currently on the team (through LinkedIn, a mutual connection, or even a cold message) and ask directly. Career coaches often recommend building these relationships anyway, in case they can refer you for a role down the line. But it doubles as an honest gut-check. A current team member has nothing to gain by selling you on a job or a team that isn’t right.
Related:
Interviews are a two-way street
It sure would be nice if you could read a team culture like a salary number. Even though it’s not immediately transparent, things like values, psychological safety, and how a team behaves under pressure all leave a trail.
When you treat interviews like a two-way audit, you can learn a lot by the questions you ask and how they talk about their own challenges.
Go beyond the interview setting and talk to people who’ve actually done the job (ideally on the same team) and find out what it’s like to work there.
None of this guarantees a perfect fit and nothing can remove all risk, but it’s much better than crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.
Because there’s no way around it: The habits, confidence, and skills you build (or don’t build) in your role will be influenced by your environment.
Treat the team the way you’d treat the job itself—as something you’re choosing.
